Page 223 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

5. Discussion 211
a negative capability or “the ability to contemplate the world without the desire to try and reconcile contradictory aspects or fit it into closed and rational systems” (Keats 1970). Moreover, a negative capability allows orga- nizations to embrace ambiguity, messiness and the unclarity that is key in achieving innovation. This dissertation hints at various suggestions for developing such negative capability.
Firstly, it can be useful for organizations to develop a separate physical space that helps employees unleash their creative behaviors. Preferably, as Chapter 2 and 4 show, such space does not fit the confines of corpo- rate offices or other associations with everyday organizational reality. The designers at Fjord created such space through decorating their work space with Post-its and design artifacts. Further, co-creation workshops with clients never took place in client’s corporate offices but were done either offsite or in the Fjord design studio. Also, at Waag Society the impor- tance of creating a separate physical space becomes clear. They organized workshops for clients in their own innovation labs that were equipped with the latest technologies and handicraft. These observations highlight that certain material environments can help to trigger creativity and trans- formative thought (Shortt 2015), and in particular that certain artifacts can help triggering creativity (Brown 2009). Elaborating on this, future research could explore whether creating physical spaces for liminality and creative transformation is an emergent practice.
Yet, creating a separate space for purposes of creativity might not prove to be sufficient. Interestingly, there is an increasing number of organiza- tions that are currently building their own in-house ‘innovation labs’ or ‘digital garages’ (Pooley 2018). Yet, especially in the last years, these corpo- rate innovation labs were questioned in popular media and on Forbes for example labelled as ‘innovation theatres’ (Viki 2018), especially making the argument that building a physical space inside a corporate office does not create creative culture which is key to developing innovations. In their work, Elsbach and Stigliani (2018) alarm the importance of building a ‘design culture’ that is not only open for change, but also support and reinforce the use of creative tools such as design thinking methodologies. In this dissertation it is suggested that collaborating with creatives can be helpful to build such design culture in organizations. For example, through organi- zing co-creation workshops, designers can include diverse members of the client organization. This can help create a bottom up energy and support.
Implications for Business Schools. Especially since business recog- nize creativity as a top skill in organizations, have accepted design as a competitive skill for organizations (Martin 2009), and the demand for design in business is still increasing, this dissertation research supports exis-