The branding literature has long recognized the power of storytelling to provide meaning to the brand and practitioners have used storytelling to enhance consumers’ connections with brands. The premise of brand storytelling has been that the story and its content, production, and distribution are the brand owner's realm and the consumer primarily a listener. The emergence of social media has changed the consumers’ role in storytelling from that of a passive listener to a more active participant. Our paper uses the metaphor of improvisation (improv) theater to show that in social media brand owners do not tell brand stories alone but co-create brand performances in collaboration with the consumers. The first and foremost contribution of such a conceptualization is that it offers a semantic framework that resolves issues in storytelling, demonstrates the necessity of co-creation in storytelling, and identifies the core of an inspiring story. The improv theater metaphor also helps identify the following three propositions relevant for branding in social media: (i) the process of improvisation is more important than the output, (ii) managing brands is about keeping the brand performance alive, and (iii) understanding the audience and its roles is the prerequisite for a successful brand performance.

Most creative acts occur in a collaborative context. Recent research contributions see the relevance of collaborative creativity but they lack a theoretical basis. What exactly is understood by collaborative creativity and above all, how it is examined, appears not to be the focus of well-founded analyses. The key objective of this paper is to present a new model characterizing collaborative product creation. This model describes theoretical essence needed for any creative collaboration. As a result, the phenomenon of communication is crystallized as the driving force for collaborative creativity. The article is divided into three sections. First, the paper focuses on creative collaboration in previous creativity research. It is shown that a different understanding of collaborative creativity exists. Second, four dimensions of the new model are presented: type of communication, course of performance, working style and the relation between the nature of problems and the implication of solutions. Lastly, the relevance of the observations for future research and creativity management is discussed briefly.

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PurposeDo LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® (LSP) workshops result in improved experience of flow components as well as higher levels of creative output than traditional meetings (MEET)? This research studies the extent to which LSP, as a specialized material-mediated and process-oriented cocreative workshop setting, differs from MEET, a traditional workshop setting. Hypotheses for differences in individual flow components (autotelic behavior, happiness, balance), group flow components (equal participation, continuous communication) and creative output were developed and tested in a quasi-experimental comparison between LSP and MEET.Design/methodology/approachThe study was conducted with 39 practitioners in six teams from various industries. In total, 164 observations were collected during two workshops using the Experience Sampling Method. The creative output was assessed by peer evaluations of all participants, followed by structural analysis and quantitative group comparisons.FindingsThe results show that two components of individual flow experience (autotelic behavior, happiness) were significantly higher in LSP, and one of the components of group flow experience (continuous communication) was, as expected, significantly lower. Regarding creative output, the LSP teams outperformed the MEET teams. The study suggests that a process-oriented setting that includes time for individuals to independently explore their ideas using a different kind of material in the presence of other participants has a significant influence on the team result.Practical implicationsLSP can improve the components of participants' flow experience to have an impact on the creative output of teams. In cocreative settings like LSP, teams benefit from a combination of alone time and high-quality collaborative activities using boundary objects and a clear process to share their ideas.Originality/valueThis is the first quasi-experimental study with management practitioners as participants to compare LSP with a traditional and widespread workshop approach in the context of flow experience and creative output.

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