"New Frontiers of Research in Creativity, Scientific Discovery, and Innovation"

Abstract

Research on creativity, scientific discovery, and innovation is growing exponentially in the management literature. This growth is a result of a convergence of at least three major drivers: 1) the increasing perception by managers that innovation is one of, if not the, most important competitive levers for their organizations, 2) rapid increases in availability of new large datasets on innovation activities or outcomes due to digitization and electronic delivery of information (e.g., electronic datasets on patents, alliances, drug approvals, licensing deals, citation databases), and 3) rapid growth in the availability of sophisticated new tools with which to collect and examine such data (e.g., network analysis tools, web crawlers/scrapers, fuzzy matching algorithms, fMRI techniques). As a result, research in innovation has not only grown in quantity, but also in diversity, with new technological trajectories being pioneered, and increasingly sophisticated methods of data collection and analysis emerging. The intensity of research activity in this area makes it challenging to create a mental map of where we have been, and where the most fruitful areas of future inquiry might be. In this panel, five innovation scholars will take a step in this direction by summarizing some of the key takeaways of prior research, highlighting what they have learned and found most intriguing. They will then discuss what they believe are some of the key trajectories for future research on creativity, scientific discovery, and innovation, while describing some of the projects they currently have underway.