Creativity Loading – Please Wait! Investigating the Relationship between Interruption, Mind Wandering and Creativity

With the advancement of information technologies, routine tasks are increasingly supported by information systems, which is why ideation and creativity is becoming more and more important. We know from many anecdotes that creative ideas emerge when our mind is wandering instead of being focused on the task at hand. Yet, most information systems that are used for work-related purposes offer only little opportunities for task-unrelated thoughts. In contrast, current literature shows that most information technology is designed to keep our attention. In order to better understand the value of mind wandering, we propose an experimental design that incorporates interruptions that vary in their length with the objective to stimulate episodes of mind wandering and thus positively impact creativity. We provide initial insights on how the experiment should designed and discuss implications for future research

On How Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation While Using Information Technology:A Research Agenda for Robust Triangulation

Our minds tend to frequently drift away from present technology-related situations and tasks. Against this background, we seek to provide a better understanding of mind-wandering episodes while using information technology and its link to decisive variables of Information Systems research, such as performance, creativity and flow. Since the academic literature still lacks reliable and validated measurements that can fully account for all facets of mind-wandering episodes while using information technology, our work addresses this gap by presenting a way to triangulate data in the context of a digital insight problem-solving task. This new approach enables researchers to further investigate the effects of spontaneous thought in technology-related settings and is a promising building block for the development of neuroadaptive systems.</p

Exploring the Role of Creativity in Business Analytics Use: A Business Analysts Perspective

Today’s businesses heavily rely on Business Analytics (BA) for informed decision-making, developing and sustaining competitive advantage, and growth. For achieving these goals, organizations aspire for creativity and creative solutions. Creativity is an important source of organizational innovation, competitive advantage, and growth, yet it remains an under-researched area in the information systems discipline. Intrigued by the influential role of creativity in organizational performance, we aim to explore its role in using BA. Through a qualitative approach, we aim to establish the importance of creativity for BA use and provide a deeper understanding of users’ (i.e., business analysts’) perceptions of creativity in the BA use process