CREATIVITY, IDEA MANAGEMENT AND INNOVATION - PREREQUISITES FOR NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT IN A FURNITURE START-UP

The current article performs a conceptual analysis upon the need and the role that creativity and innovation can play in a company, especially a newly opened start-up company that aims to achieve its own new products and bring them to the market as soon and as successful as possible. It is our belief that such a feat could be realized if the two halves of successful product development (i.e. human creativity and organizational innovation mechanisms) can be linked through the use of simple, but effective tools, grouped under the "umbrella" of idea management. Starting from this assumption, the authors present a brief situation of the state-of-the-art in the three related domains, highlighting their connections and divergence points. Further on, these connections are detailed and the demonstration of their strength is reinforced with the help of semantic analysis tools performed on a number of recent scientific articles. In the end, the paper proposes an algorithmic approach that could be used for transposing this connection into a real working environment of a small company that aims to implement a research, development and innovation project in the furniture industry, with the purpose of leveraging its success.