The Process of Bisociation at the Heart of the Ideas Factory: The Case of a Managerial Innovation

The literature establishing the link between creativity and innovation today focuses on idea generation (Cohendet et al., 2017) and encounters Koestler’s (1964) work about bisociation. This concept has received limited attention in management literature. We open the black box of this mechanism by studying the case of a managerial innovation in a cultural company. We conduct an ethnographic investigation within a grounded theory framework. This approach reveals the processual nature of bisociation. We meticulously document the process, describing and naming its different stages and the conditions of its emergence and realization. This leads to considering bisociation as a universal process of idea generation, characterized by a profound destabilization of the actor as a triggering event, a seemingly insoluble problem within his usual reference system, and the emergence of a solution at the intersection of practices related to its past experiences.