Ambient Information, Team Creativity and Innovation Performance. (R-12225)

Although defined as the process of creating new and valuable ideas, most scholars operationalize the concept of innovation as a static outcome variable (e.g., Ahuja, 2000; Baer, Evans, Oldham, & Boasso, 2015; Hülsheger, Anderson, & Salgado, 2009). Thusly, there is no consensus in the literature as to what extent creativity as an ideation process brings about innovation (Anderson, De Dreu, & Nijstad, 2004; Rosing, Frese, & Bausch, 2011). We propose that creativity is the process of generating new and useful ideas and that the output of this process is a new innovative service. The source of creative input has long been considered to be stemming solely from the individuals involved in the creative process (Bharadwaj & Menon, 2000; Scott & Bruce, 1994). More recently, a growing body of literature revised this perspective and began examining how the dynamic social interactions shape the creative process (Brennan & Enns, 2015; De Jaegher, Di Paolo, & Gallagher, 2010; Heerey, 2015). This new perspective recognizes the importance of the individuals' contribution but stresses that the individual creative potential sparks in the (social) interaction between team members (Perry-Smith & Shalley, 2003). There is still an essential gap in the literature on how the role of the social interactions varies throughout the stages of creative pursuits (generation, elaboration, implementation) (Perry-Smith & Shalley, 2014; Cui & Wu, 2015). In this PhD project we will apply a variety of human sensors to model and explain interactions between team members and predict creativity next to performance. In this attempt we will make use of network analytics as proposed by Pentland (2014) and will build on the experiences and results of previous studies and experiments in this field.

Keywords:Context, Social interactions, Team Creativity, Team dynamics

Disciplines:Learning and behaviour, Group and interpersonal processes, Innovation, research and development, technological change, intellectual property rights, Human resource management, Marketing not elsewhere classified