Fostering Creativity in New Product Development through Entrepreneurial Decision Making

Research has emphasized the importance of employees' individual entrepreneurial decision making for innovation. In this context, practised creativity as the ability to perceive and exploit creative opportunities, can be regarded as a crucial requirement for employees in new product development. We discuss the application of decision making logic as an important antecedent of practised creativity in new product development. We survey 219 employees from new product development departments of German product and service firms. Results indicate that the use of entrepreneurial decision making logic positively impacts practised creativity; comparably we find indicators that the use of causal decision making logic negatively influences creativity. The effects significantly depend on the moderating role of uncertainty. The results contribute to the literature of creativity, entrepreneurship and new product development by theoretically and empirically revealing effectuation as antecedent to practised creativity. The results open promising avenues for future research and allow the derivation of valuable guidelines for practitioners. Aligning the new product development process to support employees' entrepreneurial decision making may help generating practised creativity.