Purpose – Our study uses insights from theories of creativity and knowledge-intensive firms to conduct analysis on how creativity and innovation emerge in consultancy firms and on which organizational responses are given to the quest for organizational survival in unsettled times. We focus on the essential elements that promote the raise of new organizational areas in which new knowledge is created. A focus on these aspects is particularly interesting since consultancy firms, extreme examples of knowledge intense organization, are in danger of disruption. They are facing a fierce crisis and must focus on some sort of evolution based on creativity.
Design/methodology/approach– We adopt a qualitative research design. We interviewed 60 people inside international consultancy firms, including consultants, managers and partners based in the Italian context. The qualitative adopted approach is particularly suitable for studying socially grounded phenomena such as the one of consultancy firms as organizations made of individuals. Our approach is one of theory-elaboration. For the semi-structured interviews we used personal contacts, snowball sampling and random requests to maximize the variance in the sample. We let the interviewees describe their views about their role, tasks, relationships and approaches to work and change, following a storytelling approach.
Originality/value – There are repeated calls for empirical studies that could improve the body of theoretical work on creativity and innovation. Much prior research focused on the relation between creativity, innovation and organizational knowledge structure. Missing is a focus on the generative elements of creativity and innovation as the basis for creating new forms of knowledge.
We study creativity and innovation in management consultancy firms from an internal perspective seen as consultancy members involved in creating new management consulting knowledge. In these unsettled times, we demonstrate that the push for creativity and innovation favors management consulting firms being models for an increasingly knowledge-based economy.
Practical implications– Our analysis is particularly needed since knowledge intensive organizations are, now more the before, rethinking their way of doing business in order to remain viable in an environment questing for sophisticated and customized consulting services. Given that “the pace of change being managed by the traditional clients of consulting firms will continue to accelerate, with devastating effects on providers that don’t keep up” (Christensen, Wang, and van Bever, 2013: 4), we focus on members involved in the creation of new knowledge structures, since external relations have already been studied.
Keywords – creativity, innovation, knowledge intensive firm, consultancy, disruption