Creativity and Information Systems in a Hypercompetitive Environment: A Literature Review

Abstract

In today's hypercompetitive environment in which markets change rapidly and competitive advantages are difficult to sustain, companies are forced to innovate and identify new business opportunities. However, innovation requires ingenuity and creativity. Product and service development depends on the creativity of employees, but harvesting and bringing novel ideas to fruition is often a chaotic process, which underscores the importance of creativity management within organizations. In this article, we review the literature on creativity in an effort to summarize state-of-the-art knowledge on how to stimulate creativity and spur innovation in modern organizations. For that purpose, we use Rhodes' 4-Ps model (1961) distinguishing between creative environments (called press), people, products, and processes. Through a review of 110 journals on the AIS journal list, this article offers insights-based on eighty-eight articles-into how creativity can be stimulated and supported by attending to each of these components. The literature teaches us how to utilize, evaluate, and strategize about creativity in organizational settings. Managers are advised to advance creativity and ideation processes, for example by building virtual environments that strengthen collaboration and creativity across organizational boundaries. Researchers are encouraged to investigate the relationship between strategy and information systems (IS) usage in fostering creativity.

Exploring Divergent and Convergent Production in Idea Evaluation: Implications for Designing Group Creativity Support Systems

“…GCSS is a class of systems that allow individuals to share ideas and collaborate creatively. In support this perspective, I rely on 43 contributions on GCSS and CSS from Müller and Ulrich's (2013) review of creativity in the IS literature. To design the GCSS prototype that I present in Section 3, I elaborate on knowledge creation in relation to creative production and idea evaluation in this section.…”

“…In recent years, creativity has achieved a comeback in information systems (IS) research and practice (Müller & Ulrich, 2013). Creativity as a business trend has also influenced activities in both the private and the public sectors.…”

Information system users’ creativity

“…More than twenty years of empirical research has established that technology can augment individual users' creativity (Muller and Ulrich, 2013;Seidel et al, 2010). A critical perspective on the possibilities of advancing creativity might scowl at the idea that creativity is inherently human and that no information technology can be brought into the process.…”

“…Studying the impact of technology in facilitating creativity at the individual or group level has become the most researched creativity area in the IS research (Muller and Ulrich, 2013). The IS literature in this area has adopted key concepts from psychology and management literatures.…”

“…There is the belief that creativity can be enhanced by external factors, such as environment, reward systems, and training, as well as through support from tools and techniques (Couger et al, 1993;Muller and Ulrich, 2013). There are at least four general streams of research dealing with the links between creativity and IS (Cooper, 2000;Muller and Ulrich, 2013). One line of thinking relates to techniques and software tools for skill enhancement for an individual.…”