Case Study: An innovative firm

What kind of problems do you think the consultant is likely to encounter in doing this? How might the consultant tackle such problems?

Can you come up with ideas that the firm might consider? 

Problems the consultant is likely to encounter

There are a number of problems that the consultant might face in devising a plan for the company to transform its existing environment to a more innovation and creativity friendly. The main issues in any organization arise from how they are dealing with their human resource and what their input is in the overall functioning of the organization on different levels. Many objective scales have been developed (Amabile, Conti, Coon, Lazenby, & Herron, 1996) to help find out about how a creative environment is perceived by the human resource.  Following is a possible set of problems that are likely to be faced by the consultant and its possible solutions.

1. The overall difference between what the company considers as innovative and creative and what the staff members have to say about it. The consultant can have individual meetings with the leaders/managers and the employees to get an idea of their imagination.
2. How do the employees consider “bumping into each other”? How nearby they must be to be comfortable? The consultant must be aware of the fact that being very close to each other and all the times bumping to each other might cause conflicts. There must be a safe distance between different office units.
3. What are the financial constraints? How much the firm is ready to spend on? The consultant must inquire from the financial authorities about financing of the project and what do they expect in return for the money spent.
4. How is transforming the physical work environment to an indoor theme park going to affect the performance of the human resource? The consultant should be cautious that transforming the whole of the official environment to a theme park has its own reparations e.g. the employees might start taking more interest in the recreational activities than official work.
5. What are the psychological constraints that might be limiting the productivity of the employees on an individual and organizational level? The consultant should discuss these matters with both the employees and the management to resolve these issues as much as possible.

What would I do?

In my opinion creativity is not only come up with brand new ideas. Creativity is also about modeling various ideas and coming up with a new idea that suit your requirement, in this case an organizational goal to flourish creativity and innovation. If I was acting as a consultant to help J.J. Smith, I would closely look at the models already incorporated by Google, Facebook and others at their headquarters and other offices. I would gather as much data as possible. Then I would gather as much data as possible about what kind of an organization J.J Smith is and define parameters based on which we can compare it with Google, Facebook and other studied models. All these organization including J.J Smith are not of the same kind therefor there are going to be a lot of difference. I would then try to indigenize these models to what the limitation, constraints and requirements of J.J. Smith and hope for the best.