Innovation favours ideators and implementers, those wanting to overthrow the status quo and get on with change, challenging anybody who stands in their way. How a leader handles this unresolved organisational tension is crucial to the implementation of innovation.

This paper explores the organizational dilemma of intangibility in innovation and the consequences of ignoring it; proposes a case for a systems thinking approach to organizational creativity; reviews the emergence of organizational economics as a new field of research for analysing intangibility in organizations and offers a model for benchmarking and measuring organizational creativity, a prime resource for success for an organization or business in 21st Century.

Over the last decades organizations have spent substantial sums on building creativity and innovation capabilities, only to see their innovation investment come to very little. Innovation in many instances fails not because of any lack of intention rather there is a very vital and important element missing from the discussion - the financial leader. In other words, the elephant simply is not in the room.

How can creativity become a prime contributor to the strategic objective of an organization? 

This paper provides an historical overview of the last 100 years of the development and affects of applied creative thinking in organizations.