Creativity as Balance: Harnessing Healthy Tensions to Foster Engaged Scholarship in Creative Firms

ABSTRACT Engaged scholarship involves harnessing the competencies of academics and practitioners. It requires knowledge translation between them and identifying how each group understands key concepts such as creativity. Creativity involves novelty and usefulness, yet there is still diversity in how these elements are understood and operationalized. Our study draws from Harvey and Berry's meta‐theory of three forms of creativity—maximization, integration and balance—and their premise that the distal relationship between novelty and usefulness, the distance from the target domain in which creative products or acts are evaluated, and the distance between the creative process stages can determine the creativity form pursued. Based on interviews with academics and practitioners in creative firms, we sought to explore how their different conceptualizations of creativity can influence their collaboration and foster engaged scholarship. We identified that academics embrace the maximization form and practitioners the integration form, indicating differences in their understanding. Yet we also discovered that both groups embrace the balance form. Using a paradox lens, we view novelty and usefulness, abstract and concrete thinking, and distant and real time idea generation and implementation as tensions. We argue that embracing the balance form leads to healthy tensions between novelty and usefulness, between abstract and concrete thinking, and close cycles of iteration between idea generation and implementation due to moderate levels of novelty and usefulness, and of contextual and processual distances. This can generate shared understanding and dialogical relationships between academics and practitioners to foster effective engaged scholarship.