Dear Aacorners,

Many fantastic tracks have been accepted to the EURAM 2006 conference in
Oslo. As the lively discussion in our website indicates, we are going to
experience a conference full of arts and culture.

I would like to invite you to submit papers to our track on 'Leading for
creativity and innovation' co-chaired by David Barry, Erika Sauer and
myself. You'll find the track description below and the submission details
on the conference website soon (if they are not there yet). www.euram2006.no

Best wishes,

Arja Ropo

******************

EURAM 
May 17-20, 2006, Oslo
 
Title of the track: Leading for creativity and innovation
 
 
Track leaders: Professor Arja Ropo, University of Tampere, Finland
Professor David Barry, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Dr. Erika Sauer, University of Tampere, Finland
 
Are leadership, creativity, and innovation perhaps the same thing under
their respective skins? All are concerned with bringing something new into
the world, all are involved with moving people from one state to another,
and all work at both an objective, visible level and at a subjective, tacit,
and frequently invisible level.
 
Certainly we are seeing increased overlaps between the three domains. For
instance, recent leadership studies have developed the notion of shared or
distributed leadership to tap into real world complex problems, such as
leading creative teams (Gronn, 2002, Pearce & Conger, 2004). Shared
leadership challenges the subject-object influence between the leader and
the followers emphasized in the mainstream leadership literature) and
suggests a relational dialogue instead (Barry, 1991; Dachler & Hosking,
1995). The notion of multiple, even conflicting understandings of leadership
that are simultaneously present in creative organizations has been presented
(Koivunen, 2003). Shared leadership has also been approached from the
knowledge creation perspective with the idea that leadership knowledge
develops in and through our bodies, not only as a cognition (Ropo &
Parviainen, 2001, Ropo et al, 2002). Aesthetic, sensuous aspects of human
Interaction, such as emotions in leadership offer a new perspective to view
leadership practices in everyday innovation seeking work places (Sauer,
2005).
 
In this track, we seek to further these directions and to start new ways of
thinking‹basically, we ask what are different ways we might lead for
creativity and innovation and what are implications of such practices? Our
track will be conversational rather than presentational‹we ask that papers
and discussion questions be circulated ahead of time. We also welcome ideas
for exercises and workshop-like activities that use creative techniques.
Topics of the track might include, but are not limited to:
 
·        Is leading for creativity different than leading for innovation?
·        What is creative leadership?
·         Comparative instances of creative and innovative leadership.
·         Linking leading for creativity and innovation to other leadershp
models.
·        How do the arts figure into leading for creativity and innovation?
·         Cultural implications of leading for creativity and innovation.
·         Person/situation considerations in leading for creativity and
innovation.
·         Downsides of blending leadership, creativity, and innovation.