Sustainability, creativity and innovation in project management – Model development for assessing organizational performance through projects

Today a number of studies are published on how organizational strategy is developed and how organizations contribute to local and regional development through the realization of these strategies. There are also many articles dealing with the success of a project by identifying the criteria and the factors that influence them. This article introduces the project-oriented strategic planning process that reveals how projects contribute to local and regional development and demonstrates the relationship between this approach and the regional competitiveness model as well as the KRAFT concept. There is a lot of research that focuses on sustainability in business. These studies argue that sustainability is very important to the success of a business in the future. The Project Excellence Model that analyses project success does not contain the sustainability criteria; the GPM P5 standard consists of sustainability components related either to the organizational level. To fill this gap a Project Sustainability Excellence Model (PSEM) was developed. The model was tested by interviews with managers of Hungarian for-profit and non-profit organizations. This paper introduces the PSEM and highlights the most important elements of the empirical analysis.

The impact of creative organizational climate on the innovation activity of medical devices manufacturing firms in Hungary

The purpose of this study was to empirically investigate the impact of creative organizational climate on the innovation activity of medical devices manufacturing firms in Hungary. We applied a combined qualitative and quantitative research model, focusing on two firm’s case studies that are active in the above mentioned sector and differ to a substantial degree in their innovation activities. The connection between innovative climate and innovation was analyzed by comparing their organizational climate and perceptions of organizational members of innovation activities. Our findings revealed that classical models of creative organizational climate explain only partially the differences, although on the level of individual perceptions of climate and innovativeness we can find some connections. We found one factor that differentiated the two firms in terms of organizational climate in the predicted direction: the amount, quality, sincerity and depth of debates going on in the organization. The level of challenge (high involvement, commitment and challenging goals) and the time devoted to think about new ideas and innovative solutions (idea time) turned out to be contrary to the expectations based on previous research – although these results are less significant statistically. The results trigger further research into the sources of competitiveness in the Hungarian medical devices manufacturing sector.