Innovative Research on the Basadur Profile Assessment 2011 – (in press)
In the following papers, we gain a better understanding on navigating the world of innovation with Basadur Innovation Profile Assessment
Published: 2011 Authors: Min Basadur, Tim Basadur
Creativity is a critical success factor in organizational effectiveness. Little research has been devoted to understanding the role that attitudes play in creativity. Most has been largely theoretical. Tangible creative results require skilled creative behaviors. Creative attitudes open the doors to such behaviors and can be deliberately developed and measured. Empirically supported models of the mechanisms by which specific attitudes directly contribute to and trigger creativity are provided. These mechanisms are important for organizations to learn if they truly desire to incorporate creativity into their culture rather than just talk about it.
Published: 2012 Authors: Min Basadur, Michael G. DeGroote, Tim Basadur, Gordana Licina
This chapter focuses on how organizations can deliberately incorporate attitudinal, behavioral, and cognitive creativity skills within an organizational creativity process into their everyday work at all levels and across disciplines to become highly effective organizations and achieve sustained competitive advantage, positive people outcomes and an inevitable change to a more innovative culture. We review the evolution of the complex and wide-ranging field of Organizational Development (OD) and demonstrate how it can be incorporated into a simplifying system of Organizational Creativity (OC). We present Organizational Creativity as comprising a continuous process with prerequisite embedded attitudinal, behavioral and cognitive creativity skills that make the process work.
Published: 2014 Authors: Min Basadur, Garry Gelade, Tim Basadur
Organizational adaptability is modeled as a four stage creative problem solving process, with each stage involving a different kind of cognitive activity. Individuals have different preferences for each stage and thus are said to have different creative problem solving process “styles”. The Creative Problem Solving Profile (or CPSP) assesses these styles and maps onto and interconnects directly with the four stages of this creative problem solving process. A field study (n=6,091) is presented in which the psychometric properties of the CPSP are established and distribution of styles in different occupations and at different organizational levels are examined. A concrete blueprint is provided for organizational leaders to follow to (a) increase organizational adaptability, (b) simplify and facilitate change management, and (c) address important organizational effectiveness issues at the individual, team and organizational levels. Real world application examples are shared and future research opportunities to expand the CPSP’s usefulness are suggested.
Published: 2014 Authors: Min Basadur, Michael G. DeGroote
How might leaders stand out from the rest, especially in a turbulent economic environment? Not by spouting the same efficiency optimization skills taught in most schools, but by mastering adaptability, a seamless creative process combining analytical and imaginative thinking skills. This tangible, proven process encourages deliberate and proactive innovation. Concrete real-life business cases are provided throughout showing how business managers can distinguish their units by recognizing, measuring, and collaborating the design thinking and problem solving styles and preferences of their staff and team members through a four-stage process of problem finding, problem definition, solution optimization, and implementation for innovative edge.
Published: 2014 Authors: Haisu Zhang, Tim Basadur, Jeffrey B. Schmidt
Typically, organizations use new product development processes composed of activities followed by decision points, where projects are continued or abandoned. A decision maker likely possesses some common information also held by other decision makers and some unique information (that only she/he possesses). If a team relies mainly on overlapping, or common, information, decisions may suffer, but if they share and utilize information originally possessed by a subset of individual members, better decisions can be made. In this paper, the authors designed and conducted four studies to examine the effects of information distribution and utilization on new product team decision-making. In study 1, the findings show that team members tend to use information possessed by everyone (i.e., common information) but neglect critical information possessed only by one of them (i.e., unique information). This common information bias results in suboptimal new product continuation decisions. In study 2, the interplay between the common information bias and team commitment to the NPD project favored by unique information is examined. The results show that although commitment influences new product development team decisions, the common information bias is stronger. Study 3 was conducted to rule out an alternative explanation for the effect of information distribution—the perception of information importance. In study 4, the focal hypotheses were re-tested using a different sample to add confidence in the findings.
Published: 2014 Authors: Min Basadur, Tim Basadur, Frederik Beuk
Research studies of group creativity and innovation commonly utilize the traditional two-step diverging (ideation)-converging (evaluation) thinking process (Baer, 2003), and has focused mostly on the divergence step using the tool of brainstorming to generate ideas to solve problems. Relatively little attention has been given to the convergence step, in particular to improving group performance in the evaluation step and understanding its role in yielding high quality creative solutions. In this study, we propose that while the evaluation step is fundamental for making judgments and for the selection of ideas and options, when performed skillfully it can contribute much more to the creative process. These contributions include significantly improving the quality of the ideas being evaluated while they are being evaluated, creating emergent new and different ideas, and building informed consensus. A hands-on, effective, research-based cognitive evaluation tool called “telescoping” which offers the capability of evolving optimal decisions without sacrificing high levels of consensus is introduced. The decision making literature abounds with well known obstacles which prevent groups from achieving this combination. How skillful execution of telescoping addresses these obstacles is shared. Field research is reported that supports the superiority of telescoping versus majority vote in real world idea evaluation.
Published: 2016 Authors: Min Basadur, Garry Gelade, Tim Basadur, Richard Perez
The Creative Problem Solving Profile (CPSP) is an instrument designed to measure an individual’s preferred cognitive style for thinking and problem solving in terms of two bipolar dimensions: the apprehension of knowledge and utilization of knowledge. These two dimensions are related to a staged process of applied creativity, and preferred cognitive state differences in each stage. We review and expand the theory underlying the CPSP and report a program of significant continuous improvement of the psychometric properties of the CPSP since it was first introduced. We provide evidence that the current instrument enjoys excellent internal consistency and test-retest reliability. Finally, we suggest avenues for future research and practical application building upon the concept of cognitive problem solving style in the fields of collaborative innovation, diversity and group conflict using the CPSP, an instrument that directly maps individuals’ cognitive problem solving style onto the Creative Problem Solving Process.
Published: 2019 Authors: Min Basadur, Tim Basadur, Gordana Licina, Michael G. DeGroote
This chapter addresses the need for organizations to develop more innovative ways of thinking and behaving in order to succeed in a turbulent world. While many organizations possess ample efficiency and analytical capability, successful organizations must also learn to integrate effective adaptability and creative capability into their repertoire. Creativity attitudes, behaviors, and cognitive skills, embedded into a specific organization-wide problem solving process, must be learned, and developed such that they are second nature if organizations are to survive and thrive. Innovative thinking ability must be made a way of organizational life, side by side with analytical thinking ability, not as a “sometimes thing” or “once in a while thing.” Research has established that efficiency and adaptability are both necessary for organizational effectiveness. Operationalizing adaptability can be achieved through Simplexity Thinking, a system comprised of a number of attitudinal, behavioral, and cognitive skills embedded within a multi stage problem finding, defining, solving and implementing creative process. This system does not exclude analytical thinking and analytical tools; on the contrary, it is clear that organizational creativity competency enhances and complements incumbent analytical capabilities. One of our goals is to help the field of creativity become better understood in its applicability to real world work, rather than a discretionary, once in a while add-on.
Published: 2019 Authors: Min Basadur, Garry Gelade, Tim Basadur
We update and deepen understanding of the Basadur Innovation Profile and particularly its capability as an innovation assessment tool for individuals, teams and organizations. We report a study (Basadur, Gelade, Basadur & Skorokard, 2009) in which the Profile accurately predicts the preferred problem solving activities of people with the four different cognitive innovation styles which it measures: Generators, Conceptualizers, Optimizers and Implementers. Twenty-four response categories were significantly associated with the four style typology. We show how the four styles directly connect to a proven four stage innovation process, and integrate additional evidence of validity and psychometric reliability, provide testable future research propositions and instructive supporting real world applications.
Publsihed: 2019 Authors: Tim Basadur, Min Basadur
We update and deepen research conceptualizing how social networks with an abundance of weak links may influence innovative performance in organizations. We integrate social networks research and theory with a four stage innovation process to describe how innovation styles as measured by the Basadur Profile can be used to impact organizational adaptability through innovation. Research exploring the relationship of social networks with innovative thinking has primarily taken a structuralist approach, which emphasizes making diverse, unique knowledge accessible through organizational structures that provide a greater abundance of weaker relationships (weak ties) to introduce new or novel information or ideas. We introduce a non-structural strategy which employs employee cognitive innovation style differences to create the diversity to power a four stage innovation process that not only provides more efficient discovery of novel inputs (information, problems, possibilities, opportunities, insights) but also integrates the novel inputs provided by the weak network links as the first stage (generation) of a researched organizational innovation process that flows through the remaining continuous stages of well defined, well designed, and successfully implemented new innovations (stages 2,3,4: conceptualization, optimization, implementation). We review testable propositions and possible avenues of future research.