Ensuring a Creative and Innovative Workforce Essay

Ensuring a Creative and Innovative Workforce - Essay Example The recent shift from industrial to knowledge economies has been rapid and abrupt, leading to a series of novel discoveries and innovation in various fields across all sectors of the economy, thereby drastically increasing the significance of creating and developing a highly creative workforce. The fact that innovation is the key to human survival, has been reasserted over the years, with a wide range of creative and innovative ideas being generated and applied for human consumption. Companies today rate creativity and innovation as highly essential pre-requisite of strategies, designed to achieve their organizational goals. Various challenges can be overcome and addressed through sheer creativity, which are faced by the 21st century, such as global warming and sustainable economic development to name a few. Organizational creativity is one of the most promising issues, which is now being probed by managers and leaders, and its relevance and significance is acknowledged by the emerge nce in the recent decades. Definitions: Creativity is defined as the development of novel and useful ideas (Hemlin et al., in Mumford, 2011). According to Plucker et al., (2004) the term creativity is defined as "...the interaction among aptitude, process, and environment by which an individual or group produces a perceptible product that is both novel and useful as defined within a social context". According to Ford (1995) "Creativity is a context specific, subjective judgment of the novelty and value of an outcome of an individual's or a collective's behavior (West, 1997, Pp. 2). Innovation in generic terms refers to the development and application of novel ideas, products or services, or technologies in an organization. According to Van de Ven (1986) the process of innovation is defined as "the development and implementation of new ideas by people who over time engage in transactions with others within an institutional context. This definition is sufficiently general to apply to a wide variety of technical, product, process, and administrative kinds of innovations. From a managerial viewpoint, to understand the process of innovation is to understand the factors that facilitate and inhibit the development of innovations" (Sisaye, 2001, Pp. 105). In a nutshell, the concept of creativity entails the application of a mental as well as a social process which is fuelled by an insight regarding the future demands and requirements of consumers, and generating ideas and concepts in response to the meet the requirements of the same. Innovation on the other hand, refers to the successful application of the said ideas and concepts with a view to generate profitable outcomes. In order to successfully create and develop innovative products and ideas, it is essential for the management to hire and recruit a highly creative workforce and develop a highly productive workforce by encouraging creativity and innovation within organizations. Significance and relevance of the co ncepts as applied to organizations: Creativity is the first step or foundation of innovation, which can be achieved through the successful implementation of the creative ideas generated by the talented workforce. Innovation is one of the crucial and inevitable elements of organizational success, more so in the highly advanced society, which is practically driven

Doing gender Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Doing gender - Essay Example We understand in this it is not so much an achievement. Also gender can be achieved only till the very early years after which it becomes static and unchangeable. The second term ‘constructed’ is perhaps of most importance to both anthropologists and social scientists who constantly lay bare the various apparatus working within a societal unit, be it a family, a state or a community which defines behaviour codes pertinent to a certain gender and anomalous to another. In this paper we shall take up the character of Monica Geller from the sitcom that gave television a trailblazer Friends and see how gender is constructed everyday through actions, through pre-conceived notions and through popular belief. The T.V show Friends had been on air from September 22, 1994 to May 6, 2004. During the course of which we saw the development and bonding of six friends Chandler Bing, Rachel Green, Phoebe Buffay, Monica Geller, Ross Geller and Joey Tribbiani. For a better understanding of the issue we shall deal in it becomes imperative to discuss in a nutshell the kind of relationship that the six friends share. Monica Geller and Ross Geller are siblings, Monica being the younger, Rachel is her high school friend who was dated by many guys unlike her. Ross too had a crush on Rachel in those days. Ross and Chandler are friends from college. Chandler who lives across the hall from Monica shares his apartment with an aspiring television actor Joey Tribbiani. Phoebe we learn later had been Monica’s roommate who had moved out but remained friends. From the very first episode Monica appears to be unlike her delicate form. Her personality exudes an aura of extreme strength. Her nature is extremely over powering and she’s used to getting her way in everything. She seems to be weather-beaten in that she knows the world more than her friend Rachel Green who in the pilot episode comes out as someone to whom the only way of not depending on the parents was by get ting married. This very idea accorded to Rachel is also gender specific. Even though we laugh at the momentary humour, it is in fact a gender construction that pretty women(or for that matter women in general) can spend their lives without having to earn their bread by depending on the patriarchy which primarily constitutes of the father and later the husband. That Rachel had been moulded into such an idea is also a form of interpellation by the society. That she finds nothing wrong with it her acceptance of her gender role as daughter and wife (in both cases dependant) is her way of accepting a concept of gender which is simply constructed. In contrast Monica who is said to be bossy and competitive is portrayed as a type which in the later seasons would verge on tomboyishness and trace back its roots to her obesity in her school years and the second-shot treatment she always received from her parents who would be too busy doting on their first born Ross. This preference of the male child over the female child is the most obvious kind of gender differentiation. But that Monica decides to fight back instead of accepting her place as the ‘second’