ORGANIZATIONAL CREATIVITY CLIMATE FACTORS: LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE FRENCH ENERGY MANAGEMENT INDUSTRY

In this paper, we draw on evidence from a case study to explore how to enable organizational creativity within a centralised information system. We argue that, even if the project leaders were seeking to enable organizational creativity using a centralized system they overlooked organizational climate factors. To understand these issues, we used the componential creativity theory to explain the influence of creativity encouragements, resources and management practice) toward organizational creativity. We conclude by suggesting that the case described might be an example of the actions to avoid when an organization wants to enable its creativity within a centralized information system

The Illusion of Internal Joy

International audienceJ. Schmidhuber proposes a "theory of fun & intrinsic motivation & creativity" that he has developed over the last two decades. This theory is precise enough to allow the programming of artificial agents exhibiting the requested behaviors. Schmidhuber's theory relies on an explicit 'internal joy drive' implemented by an 'information compression indicator'. In this paper, we show that this indicator is not necessary as soon as the 'brain' implementation involves associative memories, i.e., hierarchical cortical maps. The 'compression factor' is replaced by the 'smallest common activation pattern' in our framework, with the advantage of an immediate and plausible neural implementation. Our conclusion states that the 'internal joy' is an illusion. This remind us of the eliminative materialism position which claims that 'free-will' is also an illusion

POWERPLAY: Training an Increasingly General Problem Solver by Continually Searching for the Simplest Still Unsolvable Problem

Most of computer science focuses on automatically solving given computational problems. I focus on automatically inventing or discovering problems in a way inspired by the playful behavior of animals and humans, to train a more and more general problem solver from scratch in an unsupervised fashion. Consider the infinite set of all computable descriptions of tasks with possibly computable solutions. The novel algorithmic framework POWERPLAY (2011) continually searches the space of possible pairs of new tasks and modifications of the current problem solver, until it finds a more powerful problem solver that provably solves all previously learned tasks plus the new one, while the unmodified predecessor does not. Wow-effects are achieved by continually making previously learned skills more efficient such that they require less time and space. New skills may (partially) re-use previously learned skills. POWERPLAY's search orders candidate pairs of tasks and solver modifications by their conditional computational (time & space) complexity, given the stored experience so far. The new task and its corresponding task-solving skill are those first found and validated. The computational costs of validating new tasks need not grow with task repertoire size. POWERPLAY's ongoing search for novelty keeps breaking the generalization abilities of its present solver. This is related to Goedel's sequence of increasingly powerful formal theories based on adding formerly unprovable statements to the axioms without affecting previously provable theorems. The continually increasing repertoire of problem solving procedures can be exploited by a parallel search for solutions to additional externally posed tasks. POWERPLAY may be viewed as a greedy but practical implementation of basic principles of creativity. A first experimental analysis can be found in separate papers [53,54].Comment: 21 pages, additional connections to previous work, references to first experiments with POWERPLA

Playing at Work : Organizational Play as a Facilitator of Creativity

This thesis investigates how play may benefit creativity in organizational contexts. Play and playfulness have previously been linked to creativity in children and adults, but empirical organizational research is scarce. A widely accepted definition of creativity is that it involves the production of something that is both novel and appropriate. Play is defined as a behavioral approach that is characterized by play being: voluntary, fun, frivolous, imaginative, and in some way bound by structure or rules. An important distinguishing feature of play is that it is frivolous, which means that play is done just for fun and no other results or outcomes are expected. The first study was an exploration of how play is used by organizational consultants to promote creativity, how play was thought to enhance creativity, as well as how play is encouraged in organizational contexts. The results suggested that play promotes organizational creativity via the mediating factors openness, intrinsic motivation, and the collaborative relationships needed to co-create and innovate. The investigation also identified a number of encouragers and discouragers of organizational play. Playful contextual cues and explicit permission to play are examples of encouragers, while imposed play activities and a stressful work environment are examples of discouragers. The second study explored the effect of playful cues introduced during a scheduled workplace meeting versus a control condition receiving a conventional refreshments. The findings suggested that playful cues are a promising means by which to enhance the creative climate and playfulness in workplace meetings. The findings furthermore indicated that introducing play-cues does not risk meeting productivity. The third study investigated the impact of an intervention of playful improvisational theater on organizational creativity. Organizational teams participated in a play intervention that consisted of three workshops of playful improvisational theater. Compared with the control condition receiving no intervention, the intervention group reported an increase of workplace playfulness and scored higher on post-test measures of individual and group creativity. The combined results of these three studies support previously proposed creativity enhancing effects of organizational play. The implications for organizations wishing to enhance creativity and innovation are that fostering a climate of playfulness may be a means of stimulating organizational creativity