6. Discussion
This study investigates the important association between creativity and innovation, taking into account several salient contextual attributes. Indeed, insight into the factors that support the conversion of creative ideas into innovations is still limited. Overall, we found a strong correlation between creativity and innovation. However, significant differences in the strength of the association could be observed across different levels of analysis. The strongest correlation was observed at the individual level, a finding that is consistent with Taylor and Greve (2006) who found that experienced individuals outperform teams in terms of performing exploratory and exploitative activities because they do not suffer from process losses (losses due to coordination, conflict management, communication, etc.). This result suggests that despite having relatively fewer cognitive, intellectual, and skill-based resources compared to those present at the team and firm levels, individuals appear relatively more successful at converting creative ideas into innovations because ambidexterity can be achieved through relatively simple cognitive mechanisms like switching mind and action sets (Gollwitzer et al., 1990). This finding demonstrates that firms could improve their record of turning useful and new ideas into process innovations and innovative products/services by identifying ambidextrous individuals and leveraging their efforts (Atuahene-Gima, 2003; Baer, 2012; Patanakul et al., 2012). The lower correlation and greater challenge to achieve ambidexterity at the team level is consistent with prior findings in the literature highlighting the complexity of ensuring clarity and commitment to shared objectives among team members, effective participation in decision making, management of task and interpersonal conflict, creation of support systems, intragroup safety, and an appropriate climate to convert creative ideas into innovations (e.g., West, 2002). It is generally assumed that the conversion of ideas into new innovations is non-linear, and this is certainly the case at the team level where innovative outcomes require the balancing and management of numerous complexities, tensions, and trade-offs (Van De Ven, 1986). In this study, we could not find any significant difference in the size of the creativity-innovation correlation between the team and firm level. Perhaps this can be explained by the fact that most organizations organize their product/process development activities in teams, and thus, an organization can be viewed as a collection of teams where alignment of creativity and innovation at the organizational level can be reduced to alignment of these activities at the team level. An alternative explanation is the fact that most (77 percent) of the firms in our sample are small and that in many cases the organizational level might closely approximate the team level.
