This article provides an historical overview over the last 100 years of the development and affects of applied creative thinking in organizations and asks the question why creativity has not been better understood as an organisational or business process; analysizes the findings of a 2008 major national research project entitled ‘Is Australian management creative and innovative?” in the context of contemporary creative practice in organisations and offers a benchmarking system – the Management Innovation Index™ as a way for organizations to model their creative ecology and over time, using the organisation’s key measures for success, to educate specifically to improve management innovation practice and productivity and ultimately to predict the outcomes of the organization’s creativity and innovation behaviours.