The Roots of Collaborative Innovation

Defining a managerial approach to innovation and creativity, we need a clear reference for framing innovation and creativity problems and approaches that are most likely to resolve them. Here, we can apply the Computational Information Conservation Theory (CICT) framework, developed for “Application” and “Domain” definitions as the two sides of the same coin, where Application (the problem) is Innovation and Domain is Creativity in this case (Fiorini, 1994, 2017a). As usual we start from an ill-posed problem to arrive to a well-posed problem (Hadamard, 1902) through a regularization procedure. It starts with developing a better understanding of the problem we need to solve.

Asking two basic questions can be enormously helpful. The first one is “How well is the Application (the problem) defined?”; and the second one is “Who is best-placed to solve it?” But, sometimes the proper Domain is not so cut and dried. Once you start asking these questions, you will find that they clarify the issues quite quickly. Either there is a simple answer, or there is not. Once we have asked the framing questions, we can determine which approach to Innovation makes the most sense, obtaining, from our usual four quadrant scheme, four fundamental reference categories: Inventive Innovation, Inventive Creativity, Creative Innovation, and Creative Creativity as depicted in Figure 1.

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