“Chefs’ personal creativity is often guided by intuition, whilst innovation is a process of social evaluation, greatly dependent on the perception, knowledge and value judgement of the testers”—concluded Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne Assistant Professor of Service Management, Marc Stierand and his fellow researchers, Viktor Dorfler and Jillian MacBryde from the University of Strathclyde Business School.
The March 2014 issue of Creativity and Innovation Management features a special section on facilitating creativity and innovation in hospitality organizations, Dr. Stierand’s specialty.
In “Creativity and Innovation in Haute Cuisine”, Stierand, Dorfler, and MacBryde describe what they learned from in-depth interviews with chefs from noteworthy restaurants in Michelin’s Guide Rouge and the Gault Millau restaurant guide. The specific challenge of this study was to examine the nonlinear nature of innovation which is often described as a straightforward, sequential process.
In concluding the authors noted that:
the ‘personal creativity part’ of the innovation process is an embodied experience that is often guided by intuition and that the ‘social evaluation part’ of the innovation process always depends on the perception and knowledge of the domain gatekeepers to recognize the quality of an idea.
Marc Stierand joined the Ecole Hoteliere de Lausanne faculty in Fall 2013; he teaches Economics of Food and Beverage Hospitality in EHL’s Executive MBA in Hospitality Administration programme, emphasizing the role of innovation.
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