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Latest happenings on Creative Leap project 

• Creativity and Collaboration: Transforming the Impossible seminar was held the 30th September.

• Mark Runco held a keynote on Artificial Creativity at LASER Talks on 3rd October.

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• Diving Into Radical Creativity online course is now open! 

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• Raisio announces their participation in Creative Leap.

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• Creative Leap studies individual and organizational creativity in working life for all businesses.
• The project asks how the implementation of creativity is reflected in the organization's business and whether a creative organizational culture correlates with financial success.

• The co-research projects consists of four work packages:

  - WP1 models individual and orginsational creativity through surveys.

  - WP2 looks into how creativity emerges in daily work-life.

  - WP3 measures the financial impact of creativity. 

  - WP4 focuses on project management.

• The research is funded by Business Finland and Next Generation EU.
• Timeline: January 2024 - December 2025

Director of Creativity Research and Programming, Southern Oregon University & Visiting Professor of Radical Creativity, Aalto University 

Mark A. Runco is Editor in Chief of the Journal of Creativity and a recipient of several Lifetime Achievement Awards for his research on creativity. With over 40 years dedicated to studying creativity, Runco’s research draws on cognitive psychology, developmental, clinical, genetic, historical, and economic perspectives. Mark’s journey into the field of creativity began in college when he took a class on creativity igniting a lifelong fascination that has shaped his career. 

For Mark, creativity is fundamental to daily life. It helps us to solve problems, adapt to challenges, and contribute to social, cultural, and personal well-being. As the world has become increasingly complex and fast-paced, he believes that creativity has become more essential than ever: “Creativity does all kinds of things: it supports our health for example, and it adds a great deal to quality of life. It is also related to advancements, evolution and progress. On an individual level, it also plays a strong role in development and the fulfilment of potentials …”.   

In Mark’s view, creativity is more than just a skill; it’s a way of navigating and enhancing life in a world that is continually transforming. 

Co-founder & CSO, Yellow Method 

Susanna Rahkamo is an accomplished leadership consultant, leader, a researcher and a European Champion, World Silver Medalist, and two-time Olympian in ice dancing. She specialises in analysing and enhancing organisations' innovation capacities. During her PhD studies at Aalto University, she developed models that illustrate the critical role of creativity in driving success and fostering exceptional expertise. She’s currently leading the research and analytics at Yellow Method, helping organisations uncover and integrate their creative potential as a core component of their business strategy. 

Through her experience in ice dancing, Susanna has collaborated with a wide range of creative professionals worldwide. While many assume that these individuals hold a special and rare talent and ability to innovate, Susanna has found that their achievements are rooted in pragmatic and persistent work. For her creativity is not a special skill but rather an ability everyone can access and develop. 

Susanna emphasises that everyone’s brains are “wired” in different ways, which allows each person to view the world from different perspectives. This gives everyone the ability to produce unique views, angles, ideas and concepts, which for Susanna lies at the heart of creativity. 

Astrid Huopalainen is an Assistant Professor on a tenure-track position called Leadership for Creativity at Aalto University. She is based in both the School of Business and the School of Arts, Design and Architecture, in a cross-disciplinary position where she’s able to bridge insights from organization studies with artistic research. 

“I would say that creativity is like this, holistic notion, a foundation of what it really means to be human in this world,” Astrid explains. “Processes and practices where novelty emerges are what drives us as humans and as a society.” For her, creativity is not just about individuals, but a situated, collective, and relational process that emerges between people, and between people and non-human agents such as tools, materials, technologies, and spaces. Creativity, as processual, Astrid argues, is rarely a straight path. Rather, these interactions contribute to a collage-like process in which invention happens through the process itself. 

The Creative Leap co-research project combines quantitative and qualitative perspectives, creating a unique opportunity to explore creativity on individual, team, organisational, and societal levels. Astrid and her team research how we can understand everyday creativity within organisations in more nuanced ways by looking into how it emerges in the everyday work practices. Their research highlights how company culture, shaped by power relations, ideologies, and  dominant ways of knowing and doing, can either hinder or support the emergence of creativity. This involves asking questions such as whose ideas are valued and heard, and whether organisations make space for experimentation and “half baked” or even silly ideas that may, in fact, contain the seed for something significant and transformative.

Creativity is an essential process for any organisation, yet its generative potential remains under-researched and under-utilised, Astrid states. It forms the foundation for innovation, enabling new perspectives and fresh ideas to take shape. Without it, organisations risk stagnation but with it, they gain the capacity to generate outcomes that are not only valuable and sustainable, but also meaningful.

Ana Paula Lafaire is a postdoctoral researcher in Organisational and Management Studies with a background in business and industrial design. In her research with Creative Leap, Ana Paula explores creativity as a collective and relational process. She emphasises the importance in looking into the dimensions that hinder and support creativity, such as power dynamics, diversity, technology, discourses, and rules. She is interested in rethinking how creativity is understood, ‘managed’ and legitimized. 

When doing qualitative field work, she explains it is important to notice how casual encounters that spark experimentation unfold in the everyday “which interestingly, often exceeds individual intentionality and are entangled with materiality, rhythms and spaces”. For example, how spontaneous conversations at coffee rooms are key for developing trust among colleagues, or how touching the textures of materials can led to associations of memories and new ideas. 

Ana Paula and her colleagues aim to develop a more nuanced understanding about how creative processes emerge and are valued in organisations. What she likes about this research approach is that it goes beyond the idea that “creativity is a characteristic of certain individuals, a skill or a product”. “I think one of the most interesting aspects of this project is that we get to see how people shape organisations and how organisations shape people back,” a mutual influence that is deeply tied to organisational culture of creativity. Moreover, fostering a critical dialogue between the businesses and the university “helps us to understand better, how creativity is organized and what it does in today’s society,” highlighting “how creativity has been valued and the potential for nurturing different approaches towards creativity for organizing differently.”

Matti Rossi is a professor of information systems at Aalto University School of Business with extensive publications in digital economy, information systems science, and open data. His work was recently recognised at AIS Impact Award 2024 for the research he had done with his team for technological and entrepreneurial impact.

“We need people who create things differently,” Matti states when asked about why creativity matters. While artificial intelligence can produce many routine deliverables, like marketing materials, Matti believes we need ways of doing that is qualitatively different than what machines can do. For him, creativity is about being able to think differently, to find solutions in new and creative ways or even just to use simple tools to do something better.

It's this human ability to think differently that sets us apart from machines, but creativity also gives businesses a competitive edge. The competition globally is tougher than ever, and creativity could one of the key appeals, Matti explains: “To have creative solutions or designs, it can set a business apart from the other offerings in the marketplace”. In Creative Leap, Matti is contributing to these ideas by helping to identify specific measures that can demonstrate how creativity supports and strengthens business outcomes.

Eeva Vilkkumaa is an Assistant Professor of Management Science at Aalto University School of Business. In her research, Eeva focuses on developing mathematical models to support decision making and resource allocation in companies and public organisations. She’s particularly interested in modeling uncertainties, multicriteria decision problems, and behavioral decision theory; themes that have brought her to research the role of creativity. “I think if it wasn't for creativity, we would be stuck doing things the same way they’ve always been done,” Eeva explains. 

As a researcher, Eeva views creativity as an ability to find different perspectives and produce original ideas that benefit oneself as well as others, whether through artistic and aesthetic pleasure, societal benefit, or productivity gains. She highlights how diversity and multidisciplinary collaboration, as exemplified by the Creative Leap project, play a key role in enhancing creativity. “Working in transdisciplinary projects is a great way to spark one's own creativity and also to shake up one's mental models, which is a necessary thing if you want to be creative”.

Eeva also hopes to see creativity more widely recognised as a serious asset in business: “I’m hoping that business owners really take creativity seriously, also outside what we usually call the creative industries. Nurturing a culture of creativity within companies is important not only for innovation but also because it contributes to greater profitability.”

Dr Niina Mallat is a Senior Fellow at Aalto University specialising in smart services and information systems. Although creativity is a new topic for her, she is excited to explore the interdisciplinary approach of Creative Leap and the opportunities it offers for cutting-edge research. Niina’s focus during the research in this project is examining the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into creative work, with the aim of explaining the paradoxes and tensions that occur when combining human creativity with AI computational processing.

To Niina, creativity is the spark that turns the mundane into the extraordinary and distinguishes outstanding performance from an ordinary one. She describes it as “a state of excitement and achievement,” and notes that with creativity you can achieve better results.