Advanced Technology and Creative Magic: How Technology Use Shapes the Creativity-Innovation Process

Abstract

Today more than ever, the use of technology is a daily experience for creative workers and inventors all over the world. While we know much about how technology shapes creative and innovative outcomes, we know less about how technology use shapes the creativity-innovation process. When faced with a new technology, creators and inventors have to navigate many tensions and puzzles, and how they do it is likely to change both the creative process and the way the technology is applied to it. The way individuals make sense of new technologies, decide whether or not to interact with them, and apply them to their innovative efforts has thus the potential to significantly shape the creative process and the innovation journey. As a consequence, a deeper, multidisciplinary look at the process of technology use is warranted in order to understand when the use of advanced technologies results in “creative magic”, and when instead they disrupt innovators’ efforts rather than helping them. This symposium includes four empirical papers focusing on these issues, either trying to understand how individuals and collectives make sense of new technologies entering their creative processes or whether and why they decide to apply new technologies in their work. Using Connective Action to Organize Collective Creativity in the Age of Social Media Presenter: Emily Truelove; Massachusetts Institute of Technology Designing in a Box: How Algorithms Shape the Creative Process Presenter: Alentina Vardanyan; Cambridge Judge Business School Accelerating Innovation without Killing it: Sustaining Ambiguity while Coordinating in Hackathons Presenter: Hila Lifshitz-Assaf; New York U. Presenter: Sarah Lebovitz; U. of Virginia Presenter: Lior Zalmanson; Tel Aviv U. Experimenting Strategically: How Industry Downturns Drive Standardization and Experimentation Presenter: Colleen Cunningham; London Business School Presenter: Aldona Kapacinskaite; London Business School