Coaching as a vehicle for greater creativity and innovation?

Creativity and innovation are crucial to organisational success and hence intrinsic to the UK government’s strategy (Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS), 2011). A variety of different techniques and workshops exist to facilitate both creativity, defined here as the generation of ideas (Axtell, Holman, Unsworth, Wall, Waterson & Harrington, 2000), as well as innovation, understood as implementation of ideas (ibid.). However, many well-known techniques have a questionable evidence base, an example being ‘brain storming’, a popular approach to stimulating creativity and innovation, research indicating that group dynamics can stifle individual ideas (e.g. King & Anderson, 1995). Hence, there is a rationale for working with individuals on a one-to-one basis, or in combination with one-toone/group approaches, to support individuals’ idea generation as part of a coaching paradigm, using appropriate facilitation techniques. Yet curiously, there is little research on creativity, innovation and coaching per se. This is somewhat surprising, given a) the importance of the generation and implementation of ideas to the knowledge economy that we work in, as well as b) the omnipresence and growth of coaching in the workplace and elsewhere (e.g. Passmore, 2012). Thus, in our present study, using a quasi-experimental design, we examine the effects of a newly developed coaching intervention received by an intervention group and comparing participants’ levels of creativity and innovation pre and post intervention to those of a control group, which is not exposed to the intervention. We expect the coaching to have a positive impact on participants’ generation (i.e. creativity) and implementation of ideas (i.e. innovation), as well as their creative self-efficacy. The study is currently underway; findings will be made available at the time of the conference