The Question of Maintaining Innovative Activities : Proposing a Cognitive Grid of Creativity

One key question for growing companies is how to maintain a continuous flow of innovations. This article examines the way in which existing writings view the extension between innovations. It proposes a cognitive grid as a support for innovation. The existing literature either lays out a primacy to individuals in the maintaining of the flow of innovations or a collective organisation as a factor of innovation. A third option focuses on a technology to extend innovative activity. Each one of these currents offer tools which present variable degrees of working and which struggle to link technological and organisational dimensions of all innovative activities together. This is where our contribution comes in, offering a grid which connects one innovation to another, based on the different possible ways of reasoning (analogical, inductive and deductive). The grid is applied to nine transitions of innovations for five small to medium-sized firms. The analogical method operates by transposing technology to another sector, the deductive method uses deductions from new interpretations of the environment and the inductive method infers from the second innovation of specific cases which are not tackled by the first one. It is a complementary tool of creativity aiming to maintain innovative activity: A tool which oversteps and integrates previous management techniques which, as we see it, presently confine themselves to being individual organisational or technological commands