From the History and Genealogy of Creative Approaches to Hybridization for Stimulating Impactful Innovation

Creativity and innovation processes are multifaceted and complex, encompassing technical, economic, sociological, environmental, risk, and uncertainty dimensions. Due to their novel nature, innovation cannot be predetermined but must be fostered in Socio-Technical Systems (STSs) within competitive organizations. The expertise and experience of individuals and organizations are vital in defining and optimizing existing practices and the current state of STSs. Experts play a central role in shaping the current STS model’s technical, economic, and environmental aspects. However, the uncharted areas outside this domain must be explored through creative and innovative approaches to imagine the future of STSs. During these explorations, managing dialogical orientations that may be antagonistic yet complementary, such as singularity vs average, non-linearity vs linearity, intuition vs protocol, expertise vs unknown, and so on, is crucial. Therefore, creative and innovative exploration is often complex to manage in practice, and our objective with this chapter is to illustrate how different methods/tools should be combined by hybridization to increase their flexibility of use and the chance of success in developing innovative projects.