Trains of thought on the tabletop: visualizing association of ideas improves creativity

According to the Search for Ideas in Associative Memory theory, ideas in a brainstorming session do not come one by one but rather in “trains of thought,” which are rapid accumulations of semantically related ideas. In order to visualize these trains of thought, we developed a brainwriting tabletop interface enabling users to link successive ideas together by means of graphical ropes. To test the effectiveness of this device, 48 participants (in groups of four) brainstormed for 20 min on the tabletop in one of two conditions: either with the train-of-thought interface (with graphical ropes), or without the ropes (control condition). The results show that visualizing the associations between ideas enabled the participants to produce longer trains of thought. We also assessed originality by collecting the unique ideas in the whole corpus of ideas produced by the different groups and observed that the train-of-thought condition produced more original ideas than the control one. One interpretation of this finding is that visualizing trains of thought increases cognitive stimulation, i.e., improves creativity by making others’ ideas more intelligible to the brainstorming partners, in comparison with the classical visualization of ideas as independent items.     

The eyes of creativity: Impact of social comparison and individual creativity on performance and attention to others’ ideas during electronic brainstorming

The present research aimed to examine how social comparison and individual differences in creativity might influence creative performance and attention paid to ideas generated by a partner during an electronic brainstorming session. After completing a creativity scale, forty-one psychology undergraduates generated ideas by computer with a remote partner/confederate presented as a student in either Arts (upward comparison) or Sciences (downward comparison) and who was instructed to give a list of pretested ideas. During the idea-generation task, the eye movements of each participant were tracked to measure the attention they paid to the ideas of their partner. As predicted, results showed that the quality (but not the quantity) of ideas was greater in upward than downward comparison, but only for high creative participants. Similar patterns were found for attention allocated to the partner’s ideas. We discuss the role of motivational and attentional processes for electronic brainstorming research.     

How do interactive tabletop systems influence collaboration?

This paper examines some aspects of the usefulness of interactive tabletop systems, if and how these impact collaboration. We chose creative problem solving such as brainstorming as an application framework to test several collaborative media: the use of pen-and-paper tools, the “around-the-table” form factor, the digital tabletop interface, the attractiveness of interaction styles. Eighty subjects in total (20 groups of four members) participated in the experiments. The evaluation criteria were task performance, collaboration patterns (especially equity of contributions), and users’ subjective experience. The “around-the-table” form factor, which is hypothesized to promote social comparison, increased performance and improved collaboration through an increase of equity. Moreover, the attractiveness of the tabletop device improved subjective experience and increased motivation to engage in the task. However, designing attractiveness seems a highly challenging issue, since overly attractive interfaces may distract users from the task.     

Creativity in non‐routine jobs: The role of transformational leadership and organizational identification

An increasing number of individuals work in jobs with little standardization and repetition, that is, with high levels of job non‐routinization. At the same time, demands for creativity are high, which raises the question of how employees can use job non‐routinization to develop creativity. Acknowledging the importance of social processes for creativity, we propose that transformational leaders raise feelings of organizational identification in followers and that this form of identification then helps individuals to develop creativity in jobs with little routinization. This is because organizational members evaluate and promote those ideas as more creative, which are in line with a shared understanding of creativity within the organization. To investigate these relationships, we calculated a mediated moderation model with 173 leader–follower dyads from China. Results confirm our hypotheses that transformational leadership moderates the relationship between job non‐routinization on employee creativity through organizational identification. We conclude that raising feelings of social identity is a key task for leaders today, especially when working in uncertain and fast developing environments with little repetition and the constant need to develop creative ideas.     

Innovation,Creativity and Information Behaviour

The inventors of creativity techniques, such as brainstorming, brainwriting, synectics, bionics, and morphological analysis, leave no doubt about the effectiveness of these instruments for generation of new ideas. But definite empirical proof is still lacking. We argue that differences in assessing the creativity techniques exist as a result of ignoring difficulties of users in coping with information behaviour. Most of the structures neglect the problem of information overload. They favour uncontrollable information generation and processing. This leads mainly to slogans, catch-phrases, and aphorisms. Complex follow-up work is required. We argue that an optimal fit is needed between the problem to be solved and the respective creativity technique.     

Stimulating design team creativity based on emotional values: A study on idea generation in the early stages of new product development processes

Creative ideas are essential for the generation of original ideas ultimately leading to innovation. The process of generating creative ideas can be enhanced by providing stimuli to a design team. However, implementing these stimuli can be a time consuming and complex process, limiting the practicality of this strategy. On the other hand, a large number of approaches have been proposed to deal with the consumers' emotions and, although substantial research has been carried out in this area, no academic references related to emotional stimuli for creativity could be found in the literature. In view of this, a question is raised: would easy-to-use and prescribed emotional stimuli for creativity enhance the generation of ideas when compared to traditional brainstorming? This paper outlines a method developed to encourage a design team to be inspired by human emotions while generating ideas for a product portfolio. To reach this goal, a set of emotional stimuli for creativity, named ‘emotriggers’, were created. The proposed method was applied in a set of experiments to validate the effectiveness of emotional stimuli for creativity, evaluating the ideas generated based on four criteria: quantity, quality, variety and novelty. As a result, the emotriggers were shown to help generate ideas, improving all of the four metrics, and the method received positive feedback from team members on its practicality.     

We walk the line: Icons provisional appearances on virtual whiteboards trigger elaborative dialogue and creativity

Collaborative groupwork is a key creativity tool in industry. Digital Creativity Support Systems (CSS) have become a critical catalyst of distributed creative processes. Under laboratory conditions, this interaction design study uses an experiment to investigate the impact of apparent icon finishedness as a social affordance for elaborative dialogue, and enhanced creativity. The experiment examines the idea generation processes of 37 pairs of active managers using a synchronous CSS. Apparent finishedness is a purely presentational factor - it is completely separate from the actual substance of an idea. The results show that presenting ideas with icons made of sketchy natural lines with low perceived finishedness encourages elaborative dialogue and creativity. Low perceived finishedness icons functioned as a social affordance - they afforded the social behaviour of building upon each other’s ideas as well as more creative idea generation. This is the first study to quantitatively examine the perceived finishedness of icons. This study shows that minor changes in visual treatments significantly impact creative processes and outcomes. As co-constructive interaction is central to many collaborative behaviours across working and learning, this study has clear implications for the subtle encouragement of co-construction in computer-mediated communication.     

How do Individual‐Level Factors Affect the Creative Solution Formation Process of Teams?

The generation of creative solutions involves nonlinear dynamic procedures that can only be achieved through the creativity of individual team members. Thus, it is important to understand how the formation of individual‐level creativity factors influence the creative solution formation process. The creative solution formation process can be divided into four phases: idea generation, idea screening, idea development and solution verification. Prior research suggests that the creative process may be affected by motivation (intrinsic and extrinsic), knowledge stock (explicit and tacit), individual creativity (intelligence and divergent thinking), and pressure (challenge and time). We tested the effects of these eight factors on performance in the idea generation and idea development phases by conducting an experiment. Our results indicate that intrinsic motivation, intelligence and divergent thinking have a significant positive effect on both idea generation and idea development. Tacit knowledge and challenge pressure have a significant positive effect on idea generation. Time pressure has a significant negative effect on idea development. We also show that both idea generation and idea development have a significant impact on the quality of the final creative solution.     

Development and Validation of Team Creativity Measures: A Complex Systems Perspective

Without formalizing the team creativity (TC) concept with reliable and valid measurement, it is difficult to conduct rigorous research to help teams generate creative ideas and problem solving at a high level, of good quality and great value. The one‐sidedness and lack of depth of existing research on team creativity leads to the limited reliability and validity of team creativity measurements. In order to solve these problems, we introduce the complex system theory and develop the TC Scale with nine items for team creativity from three dimensions: team creative thinking, team creative action and team creative outcome. The data is collected from three distinct positions of respondents (managers, team leaders and senior staff) in 183 creative teams. The results of reliability measures, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis strongly support our scale. Further, we test the correlation between team trust and team creativity to establish its predictive validity and make a further verification on the scale structure through second‐order confirmatory factor analysis. Finally, we discuss the implications for research and practice.     

Assessing Job Candidates' Creativity: Propositions and Future Research Directions

Identifying and selecting creative employees is of key importance in today's high‐pace business environment. Yet, little is known about how assessors in organizational settings evaluate the creative potential of job candidates. In this paper we review the extant literature on individual and team creativity in order to identify criteria (cues) against which job candidates' creativity could be assessed. We argue that the creative potential of job candidates could be evaluated against four key dimensions (the creative individual, the creative product, the creative process and the creative environment) and call for empirical research to further explore and test our propositions in practice.     

What if it Switched on the Sun? Exploring Creativity in a Brainstorming Session with Children Through a Vygotskyan Perspective

We contribute in this study a first step in theory-based understanding on how creativity in collaborative design sessions relates to the elements that are present in a creative act. These elements include group composition, objects present, practices used, and previous knowledge of the participants. The context of this study was our search for lightweight methods for technology design with children, which can be used in a school context with large groups, will require as little amount of training as possible, and can be set up quickly. We formed a mixed group, consisting of young children, an older child and an adult, with the aim of involving children in creative collaborative brainstorming during the very early phases of design, so as to come up with fruitful ideas for technology development. We report our process and examine the implications of our results in relation to different elements that trigger and affect creativity in the collaborative design process. Use of Vygotsky’s cycle of creativity as our theoretical lens together with timeline analysis method presented in the paper were essential for seeing beneath the surface of what happened in this complex, collaborative creative process. Our results can be used for further methodological development of creative collaborative sessions, both with children and adults.     

Developing design concepts in a cloud computing environment: creative interactions and brainstorming modalities

Abstract

This article presents the key components required to properly understand remote creative interactions associated with three collective design stages: co-definition; the ideas co-production; and the co-evaluation in the formulation of a design concept. We compare five brainstorming modalities: traditional brainstorming—graphical interaction, reverse brainstorming, brainwriting and brainsketching—adopted by six delocalised teams working through a cloud computing environment. We analyse: co-authoring production; the ratio of ideas production according to task-goal; and the variation of brainstorming modalities. Our results show that designers work on brainstorming modalities according to the task-goal assigned, and we see that task content and the verbal and graphical communicative modes are supported by the proposed computational environment; as well as all brainstorming modalities. Because co-authoring or collective sketching are hardly possible without verbal communication support in graphical production, we propose the use of these new cloud computing functionalities to enhance the distributed design work.     

Employee creativity in war zones: Empirical evidence from small firms in Afghanistan

The major concern of employees during times of war and conflict is apparently physical survival. But how are top managers of small‐sized companies enhancing the generation of novel and useful ideas by their employees in such physically dangerous business environments? In Afghanistan, as a war‐torn country, this research examined for the first time how getting closer to employees—which is conceptualized as internal marketing orientation culture in our study—directly affects the generation of novel and useful ideas by employees in the workplace. Our analysis is based on survey data from 81 newly established small‐sized companies in Afghanistan. Results indicate a mediating role of employees' perceived psychological safety on the relationship between internal market orientation culture and employees' creative work involvement. Moreover, we discuss the impact of employees' creative work involvement on small‐sized firm competitiveness improvement in general. Finally, we extend our implications in the context of the componential theory model of creativity, which might also serve as a framework for future research.     

A Theoretical Framework Linking Creativity,Empowerment, and Organizational Memory

Empowerment, creativity, and organizational memory are constructs that have been researched in MIS. While each construct has received individual attention, we have found relatively little research linking them. One of the major edicts of empowerment is delegation of decision making authority to lower-level employees. Increased authority allows employees more freedom to be creative. However, if creative thought is generated but not captured, innovative ideas may be lost. Organizational memory can capture creative ideas as they are generated so that empowered teams can draw upon positive creative experiences. We developed a theoretical model to illuminate the relationships between organizational memory, worker empowerment, and creativity. The model portrays the linkages between empowerment and creativity, creativity and organizational memory, and organizational memory and empowerment. The model was developed based on the literature in each respective area and an interview-based study concerning “empowered” systems development project teams and organizational memory. Analysis of the interview data revealed that empowered workers generate creative solutions to problems. However, creative solutions can only be used for future projects if they are somehow recorded into organizational memory. Organizations that empowered their workforce and embraced creativity reported increased customer satisfaction, waste reduction, and some quality gains. In contrast, those that did not empower reported little or no change. Organizations that recorded creative solutions to problems believe that retrieval of this information could be potentially useful for future projects. Potential challenges faced by organizations classified into each cell are also presented. This classification scheme should prove useful as a guide to organizations examining the potential benefits and pitfalls of worker empowerment and organizational memory.     

Where the Art is: Defining and Managing Creativity in New Media SMEs

This paper examines the definition and management of creativity in the ‘creative industries’. Initially the paper sets out the economic and cultural context for the emergence of the creative industries, before going on to argue that there are gaps in our understanding of the role of creativity and particularly the management of creativity within these industries. Based on research undertaken with new media SMEs in the North West of England, the paper then explores the ways in which creativity is defined and managed within this sub–sector. It is shown that the meanings attached to creativity are variable and contested and that the precise definition and management of creativity is strongly determined by the internal workplace culture, and the external social and economic conditions within which firms operate. It is further suggested that while creativity is often seen as a ‘must have’ attribute for new media firms it may also, conversely, be considered a barrier to commercial success. The paper concludes that if we are to understand work and production in the creative industries, and offer institutional support for firms to develop and sustain creativity for competitive advantage, it may be necessary to develop a more detailed understanding of the role of creativity and creative management as both a general and specific, socially embedded process.     

Creativity and Innovation through Multidisciplinary and Multisectoral Cooperation

This paper explores the relation between creativity, innovation and new product development in multidisciplinary and multisectoral settings. We claim that the development of innovative products benefits from the generation of a high number of creative ideas. Moreover, we argue that the idea generation process can be particularly fruitful within collaborative multidisciplinary environments, where firms and Science and Technology institutions coexist and cooperate. Our approach draws on existing literature to investigate the creativity and idea generation process within the frame of multisectoral and multidisciplinary cooperation initiatives, involving firms and Science and Technology related institutions. We then call upon our own empirical work to identify conditions favourable to those processes and some issues that affect the fulfilment of the creative potential that exists in multidisciplinary groups.     

The design,development, and deployment of a tabletop interface for collaborative exploration of genomic data

In this paper, we reflect on the design, development, and deployment of G-nome Surfer; a multi-touch tabletop user interface for collaborative exploration of genomic data. G-nome Surfer lowers the threshold for using advanced bioinformatics tools, reduces the mental workload associated with manipulating genomic information, and fosters effective collaboration. We describe our two-year-long effort from design strategy to iterations of design, development, and evaluation. This paper presents four main contributions: (1) a set of design requirements for supporting collaborative exploration in data-intensive domains, (2) the design, implementation, and validation of a multi-touch tabletop interface for collaborative exploration, (3) a methodology for evaluating the strengths and limitations of tabletop interaction for collaborative exploration, and (4) empirical evidence for the feasibility and value of integrating tabletop interaction in college-level education.     

What can economic coordination do for creativity and well-being?

The scope of this paper is contributing to unveiling how economic organizing can be more humanistic by delving into ideas of well-being and advancing them through the concepts of creativity. Accordingly, our contribution reflects on how designing and implementing organizations and processes inspired to creativity can ameliorate the life of participants. We therefore analyse issues of economic coordination through fundamental mechanisms elaborated by organizational economists (market exchange, organized hierarchies) and associate them with diverse consequences in terms of creative capacity. Illustrations are taken from the creative sectors. The creativity dimension (as an outcome) assumes especial relevance in our analysis, not only or primarily because of its potential link with competitiveness and economic prosperity (as in the current economic approach to creativity) but mostly because of the connections with the creation of a public good in the form of well-being and value for the public.     

Proteus vs. social identity effects on virtual brainstorming

ABSTRACT

Avatars are known to influence behaviour through their individual identity cues (Proteus effect) and through their shared identity cues (Social identity effect). The aim of this study was to investigate these two processes in a crossed design, in order to examine their interaction in the context of a brainstorming task. To activate the Proteus effect, we used creative avatars resembling inventors, and to make social identity salient, we made the avatars wear the traditional clothing of the participants’ school. The resulting factorial design included four conditions: creative avatars with or without social identity cues, and non-creative avatars with or without social identity cues. The results show that creative performance was higher with creative than non-creative avatars, but only in the absence of social identity cues. Furthermore, the presence of social identity cues increased social identification to the group, but this unexpectedly decreased creative performance. This result is discussed together with an analysis of the meaning of the social identity cues we used, which appeared to be unrelated to creativity. This discussion highlights that the effects of social identity cues on performance are complex and may be moderated by their meaning and the particular facet of social identity they make salient.     

Creativity (Ideas) Management in Industrial R&D Organizations: A Crea‐Political Process Model and an Empirical Illustration of Corus RD&T

Creativity management is a crucial topic to consider in the debate about the innovative research department. Against the background of discussions about individual creativity and organizational commitment, this article argues that the creative process in organizations is a matter of political strategies. The ideator literally has to sell his/her idea. The article therefore comes up with a crea‐political process model in which there is ample room for the thought that ideas emerge and survive within a social‐political context. In addition, the crea‐political process model is used to analyse the way in which the Corus Group Research Development and Technology (RD&T) department has implemented an electronic idea‐management system. The system, called eureka!, has been designed as a straightforward platform to capture, review, evaluate and select creative ideas. The findings challenge the literature on idea management in organizations to consider the political activities of ideators in the whole process of creativity.