The Impact of Management on Creativity and Knowledge Transfer in an Academic Virtual Enterprise

To succeed in the market it is necessary for the companies to fully research customer needs and generate solutions which can best satisfy them. Creativity plays a crucial role in this process. If it is correctly implemented into the innovation process, it can mean a decisive competitive advantage for the company. It is connected to the idea generation phase within the overall NPD process. Innovation is the implementation of the results of creativity [1]. A NPD can be defined as an innovative process whereby the inputs into the process are creative ideas and the final result is a definition of the final product. The chain of four loops is introduced, representing a possibility of iteration in any phase of NPD [2]. The first loop guides the developer from abstraction to goal definition. The result of the first loop in NPD, where idea generation plays the primary role, is a research goal or task that needs to be further specified in the process. Further three loops guide the developer through the planning process from the definition of the design process through the specification of the design requirements, evaluation of design requirements, iteration between function and shape, presentation and expert assessment and finally to the use of particular results after each step of design process. We chose this model to represent the NPD process due to the fact that it recognizes several important factors of the NPD that were presented in other models (i.e. VDI 2222) and also introduces the importance of idea generation and the formation of a research goal which are both highly influenced by creativity. In a highly competitive global environment a company needs to use external sources of knowledge and technology