How creative are SMEs? An organizational routines’ perspective

Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are perfect exemplars of creative organizations partly because they have fewer corporate rules and regulations that hinder creative behaviors of individual employees. Yet, we know very little of the actual processes SMEs employ in their creative endeavours. This appears to reflect the general state of creativity research where emphasis is usually placed on antecedents and outcomes of creativity with relatively less attention on how organizations actually organize their creative activities. This article takes a step towards addressing this paucity in creativity research by suggesting organizational routines as an analytical tool to explore the processes of creativity in small software firms. The article argues that routines offer an entry point to understanding SMEs when conceptualized as systemic blueprints that are capable of explaining observable and sometimes latent behaviours of organizational actors’. A suite of methodologies that could be employed by researchers adopting a routines’ perspective in exploring organizational phenomenon are also identified.