How Feature- and Communication Constraints in CSS Affect Creative Collaboration in Virtual Teams - An Activity Theory Perspective

New Creativity Support Systems (CSS) provide additional features, but are also growing more complex and difficult to operate. Via new functionalities, CSS aim to facilitate virtual creative collaboration and enable better outcomes. However, research shows that, especially in the context of creativity, better outcomes are not always the result of more options and features. Our study applies activity theory (AT) as a lens in order to examine how constraints can be applied to creative collaboration in virtual teams. This study advances research on collaboration in information systems (IS) as well as human-centered development of IT-artifacts that facilitate creative collaboration. Our findings provide two practical takeaways for CSS developers and virtual teams: First, constraints in CSS can be designed to substantially benefit idea generation and exploration beyond routine performance; second, constraints can be designed to help teams access the potential of CSS faster and more efficiently

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

Most organizations need to evaluate novel ideas to identify their value. However, current idea evaluation research and practice hinder creativity by primarily facilitating convergent production (narrowing down ideas to a few tangible solutions) but discounting divergent production (the development of wildly creative and novel thoughts patterns). In this paper, I challenge this dominant view on idea evaluation by presenting a new theory I call dynamic idea evaluation and exploring the theory through a group creativity support system (GCSS) prototype. I designed the GCSS prototype as an idea portal that uses the knowledge created from the evaluation process to facilitate both convergent and divergent production. I designed the GCSS using an inductive and theory-building design science research (DSR) approach and interpretively analyzed it through an exploratory study in a Danish IS research department. I found that the GCSS demonstrates the ability to facilitate both divergent and convergent production during idea evaluation. Moreover, I add four design requirements and process architecture to help designers to build dynamic idea evaluation into this class of systems

Divergent Innovation: Directing the Wisdom of Crowd to Tackle Societal Challenges

Crowdsourcing is acknowledged as a promising avenue for addressing societal challenges by drawing on the wisdom of the crowd to offer diverse solutions to complex problems. Advancing a new conceptual framework of ‘divergent innovation’ which delineates between topic and quality divergence as focal metrics of performance when crowdsourcing for solutions to societal challenges, this study investigates the impacts of four ideation stimuli on divergent innovation. These four stimuli include task description concreteness, resource richness, topic entropy, and judging criteria comprehensiveness. Empirical analysis based on data sourced from an online crowd-ideation platform reveals that task description concreteness negatively affects topic divergence but positively influences quality divergence, whereas resource richness positively affects topic divergence but negatively influences quality divergence. Additionally, the relationship between topic entropy and topic divergence is U-shaped, with no significant impact on quality divergence. These findings contribute to extant literature on crowdsourcing and offer invaluable insights for practitioners

Software tools for supporting reflection in design thinking projects

In creative work such as design thinking projects, teams mostly seek to solve complex (wicked) problems as well as situations of uncertainty and value conflicts. To design solutions that cope with these aspects, teams usually start doing something, reflect on their results, and adjust their process. By actually doing something, tacit knowledge (i.e., knowing-in-action) of individuals is disclosed, which might be beneficial for an entire project team because it allows drawing on information and experiences that go beyond single individuals. Accordingly, the present study aims to investigate how tools can be designed that support collaborative reflection in creativity-driven projects. Drawing on reflection theory and several expert interviews, we derive design requirements as well as present a concrete software-based prototype as an expository instantiation

What You Know and What You Don\u27t Know: A Discussion of Knowledge Intensity and Support Architectures in Improving Crowdsourcing Creativity

Building on the componential theory of creativity, we studied how the crowdsourcing creativity support architectures and the task knowledge intensity levels affect the crowd’s creativity. Using an online experiment, we found that remixing can trigger the crowd to be more creative than external stimuli and using either architecture triggers the crowd to be more creative overall. Also, the crowd is more creative in solving low-knowledge-intensity tasks than in solving high-knowledge-intensity tasks. Interestingly, regardless of the knowledge intensity levels of tasks, crowdsourcing support architectures have a significant impact on the crowd’s creativity. Therefore, our paper contributes to the crowdsourcing literature on promoting crowd creativity and provides practical implications on solving societal challenges, especially large-scale problems

Improving Design of Systems Supporting Creativity-intensive Processes – A Cross-industry Focus Group Evaluation

Organizations depend on the creative potential of their members to continuously develop innovative solutions. Groups commonly approach creative processes using collaborative IT. However, current design of information systems does not cater to the business processes representing the context in which groups operate. Creativity-intensive processes are a conceptualization of business processes that involve creativity. Voigt, Bergener, and Becker (2013) developed an explanatory design theory for information systems supporting creativity-intensive processes. The core component of the design theory is an information system architecture for creativity-intensive process support systems (CPSS). This paper evaluates the utility of the CPSS architecture to comprehensively support creativity-intensive processes. Three exploratory cross-industry focus groups, in which the architecture instantiation CreativeFlow was demonstrated, suggest that the features of CreativeFlow and the underlying architectural concepts are useful in supporting practitioners’ processes, especially for the support of creative group processes. However, three modifications to the CPSS architecture emerge: increased freedom for choosing individuals responsible for group tasks, differentiated authorization for creating and assigning creative group tasks, and advanced communication support for initiation of standard workflows. The evaluation further contributes recommendations for tool features and four research issues to advance system design of tools supporting creativity in business processes. The study provides insights for future information system evaluations in Design Science Research on Information Systems

Guide to build YOLO, a creativity-stimulating robot for children

YOLO is a non-anthropomorphic social robot designed to stimulate creativity in children. This robot was envisioned to be used by children during free-play where they use the robot as a character for the stories they create. During play, YOLO makes use of creativity techniques that promote the creation of new story-lines. Therefore, the robot serves as a tool that has the potential to stimulate creativity in children during the interaction. Particularly, YOLO can stimulate divergent and convergent thinking for story creations. Additionally, YOLO can have different personalities, providing it with socially intelligent and engaging behaviors. This work provides open-source and open-access of YOLO's hardware. The design of the robot was guided by psychological theories and models on creativity, design research including user-centered design practices with children, and informed by expert working in the field of creativity. Specifically, we relied on established theories of personality to inform the social behavior of the robot, and on theories of creativity to design creativity stimulating behaviors. Our design decisions were then based on design fieldwork with children. The end product is a robot that communicates using non-verbal expressive modalities (lights and movements) equipped with sensors that detect the playful behaviors of children. YOLO has the potential to be used as a research tool for academic studies, and as a toy for the community to engage in personal fabrication. The overall bene t of this proposed hardware is that it is open-source, less expensive than existing ones, and one that children can build by themselves under expert supervision.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

How to present ideas in idea crowdsourcing communities? Pathways for idea convergence and divergence performances

Currently, idea crowdsourcing communities are widely used for solving problems and fostering innovation. However, when encountering substantial ideas delivered by idea crowdsourcing communities, individuals are hard to generate novel ideas (i.e., idea divergence) and evaluate the appropriateness of the delivered idea (i.e., idea convergence). To address this challenge, platform operators tend to improve the idea presentation design. However, the effectiveness of these idea presentation designs for idea crowdsourcing community users remains unclear. Therefore, we tend to uncover the influencing mechanism of four types of idea presentation design (idea tree, slides, lists, and grids) on idea divergence and convergence outcomes. Accordingly, we adopt dual pathway to creativity model as our theoretical framework and propose an experimental research design. This study will provide insights into platform attribute design and design strategies for improving idea divergence and convergence outcomes

Tool Support for Design Science Research—Towards a Software Ecosystem: A Report from a DESRIST 2017 Workshop

The information systems (IS) field contains a rich body of knowledge on approaches, methods, and frameworks that supports researchers in conducting design science research (DSR). It also contains some consensus about the key elements of DSR projects—such as problem identification, design, implementation, evaluation, and abstraction of design knowledge. Still, we lack any commonly accepted tools that address the needs of DSR scholars who seek to structure, manage, and present their projects. Indeed, DSR endeavors, which are often complex and multi-faceted in nature and involve various stakeholders (e.g., researchers, developers, practitioners, and others), require the support that such tools provide. Thus, to investigate the tools that DSR scholars actually need to effectively and efficiently perform their work, we conducted an open workshop with DSR scholars at the 2017 DESRIST conference in Karlsruhe, Germany, to debate 1) the general requirement categories of DSR tool support and 2) the more specific requirements. This paper reports on the results from this workshop. Specifically, we identify nine categories of requirements that fall into the three broad phases (pre-design, design, and post design) and that contribute to a software ecosystem for supporting DSR endeavors