How Flexibility Facilitates Innovation and Ways to Manage it in Organizations

Flexibility is the capacity to change and to adapt to a challenging environment. It can be either adaptive – when challenges are present in the environment – or spontaneous – a preference for change without any external pressure. Change and adaptation are also key elements of innovation. In this article, we examine how different types of flexibility can play a major part in the innovation process. First, we discuss how flexible cognition and a flexible personality can facilitate the generation of innovations. Second, we discuss how flexibility can be beneficial to the audience for innovations. Lastly, we use the previous discussion of the benefits of flexibility for innovation to illuminate and present some approaches to the improvement of flexibility – both of employees and of the audience – for innovation. These approaches come both from other researchers’ work and from our own original research on the best practices of innovation management in Europe.