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The Creative Leap project adopts a qualitative approach in work package two, aiming to study how companies foster knowledge and collaboration for creativity. During the fall of 2024 and the early months of 2025, Postdoctoral Researcher Ana Paula Lafaire, Doctoral Researcher Maria Uusitalo, and Astrid Huopalainen, Assistant Professor in the field of Leadership for Creativity, immersed themselves with our partner companies, conducting fieldwork and more than 80 interviews with experts in the field. Kemira, Fiskars, Marimekko, Posti, and Raisio generously granted us access to observe how creativity and new ideas emerge in their everyday work routines, meetings, and coffee breaks. We gained valuable insights into the tacit knowledge, details, and spaces that help us better understand how creativity and new ideas emerges. But why is it relevant to attend to the aesthetic dimension of organizations?

For a long time, aesthetics has been a fairly overlooked aspect in the fields of organizational and business creativity. Aesthetics, as a term, is often perceived as vague and slippery, used somewhat broadly. Here, we don’t simply refer to artworks within or the physical environment of organizations, nor to the development of outcomes that are "beautiful," sublime," or "grotesque," or have some aesthetic value. Rather, we approach aesthetics as a form of knowledge rooted in the senses, and explore how developing this kind of sensory knowledge is vital to the different creative processes we have observed.

Aesthetics, as a form of knowledge based upon the senses, plays a central part in creativity and innovation work – collectively developing something surprising, novel, and useful. For example, sharing an overnight oats breakfast porridge with homemade apple jam may set the affective tone for a day of internal 'innovation pitching' competition. The care put into crafting both the jam and the porridge may help foster deeper bonds and friendships within the company—also essential for being open and ‘vulnerable’ about one’s half-baked ideas during pitching or encouraging constructive critical dialogue and the clashing of different viewpoints. Moving a whole team out of the office to an employee’s home to prepare and cook dinner together while ideating can be hugely beneficial, as it allows for sensory inspiration, casual idea-sharing, and more freedom away from the usual office routine. Alternatively, after sharing results in the office, having a lively mingling session with “laskiaispulla” (shrovetide bun), with the CEO chatting informally with the design team, can create a more relaxed atmosphere.

Spaces and aesthetics matter—and the very playfulness of aesthetic knowing (humour, poetics, rhythms) opens up forms of communication that may foster deeper trust, friendships, and bonds that strenghten a culture of psychological safety – important for creativity. The vibrant materiality of colorful, fresh flowers placed in beautiful glass vases at the lunch café, as well as in every office, store, or showroom, influences and affects our mood. These details, such as the design furniture, green plants, board games and knitting in the breaks, play a role in crafting relationships and meaning between the company, the brand and the world, fostering lasting 'emblematic' associations. Colors, textures and prints have aesthetic and affective power – they may indeed shape our social realities.

Aesthetics play a part in companies that allow space for ‘creative experimentation’. Investing in details, rich in aesthetic value, may be of utmost importance for the creative process. At the same time, this does not refer to instrumentalizing the aesthetic (Strati, 1999), resulting in attempts at “colonizations of the idea of the beautiful as an instrument of corporate managerialism” (Hancock and Tyler, 2000, p. 109). There is no simple causal relationship between aesthetic and its reception, as much aesthetic communication in organizations will arise without conscious intent or without managing (Harding, 2003). Knowing how a particular machine works, learning to ‘play’ it like an instrument is a form of aesthetic, tacit knowing. Likewise, developing an eye for the smallest details – the sense, look, and feel of a product, balancing conceptual and commercial needs, requires in-depth aesthetic knowing. Intuition has its place in the creative process, although we tend to overemphasize the rational aspects. 

For creativity to emerge in the everyday of a company, there is value of tacit and aesthetic knowledge, sharing such knowing in the company in various everyday encounters. Also, encounters that foster trust for collaboration are part of fostering a culture “for the long run”. This relates to how knowledge circulates in organizations in tacit, aesthetic and embodied ways, and how it’s recognized and “celebrated” or potentially constrained.