Organizing Creativity for Innovation: Situated Practices and Process Perspectives

Abstract

This volume brings together empirical and conceptual papers that investigate the challenges of organizing creativity in the innovation journey in and across different empirical contexts. Seen as the basis for innovating new products, processes or services, organizing creativity is investigated as intentional efforts that occur in teams, organizations, and fields. What creativity is, how it is defined, negotiated and recognized is hereby co-constructed with different audiences and in different economic and societal spheres. The articles in this volume extend our understanding of these contextualized social dynamics of organizing creativity in four directions. The first direction sheds light on the temporal dynamics of organizing creativity in artistic fields. The second direction compares creative processes in arts and science, thereby examining tensions and uncertainties in the creative process unfolding in two distinctive contexts of creativity. The third direction investigates identity struggles of creative agents in organizations with clashing roles, professional norms, and ambiguities in creativity assessment. The fourth and final direction unravels the communicative journey of ideas from pitching to feedback, revealing how ideas are challenged, enriched, and acquire meaning in communicative interaction. Overall, the articles in this volume contribute to a situated view of creative processes in innovation which goes beyond questions of idea generation to account for dynamics of idea development, judgement, and dissemination which involve identity struggles, evaluation, and communication -processes which are at the heart of organizing for innovation. Innovation" of the 35th EGOS Colloquium in Edinburgh co-organized by Birke Otto, Oliver Ibert and Elke Schüßler. We are grateful to Joerg Sydow for comments on earlier drafts and for heading the DFG Research Unit "Organized Creativity", which provided a fruitful environment for this volume to develop. Silviya Svejenova gratefully acknowledges funding from the Velux Foundation (Velux Project #00021807 "The Temporality of Innovation") for her work on this volume and introduction. Thanks also go to René Haas for help with formatting and administration, and to all the reviewers for their generous and constructive comments.

Regulating Nimbus and Focus: Organizing Copresence for Creative Collaboration

“…First, our insights advance discussions on the practices of organizing collaborative spaces for creativity and hence contribute to a more situated understanding of organizing creativity (Schüßler, Svejenova, & Cohendet, 2021). By shifting the focus from organizing spaces to organizing copresence, we provide a conceptual language to study the social dynamics underlying creative collaboration in different spatial settings.…”

Rethinking geographies of sovereignty: Towards a conceptual framework of situated sovereignty

“…Communities and collaborative practices may be a delimiting element of such freedom, giving social practices and transactions some orientation (Schüßler et al., 2021). This, in turn, can be seen as a prerequisite for the emergence of situatedness, because once a decision for collaboration has been made and reference to a (thematic) community of practice has been established, experimental forms of doing “things collaboratively” are likely to unfold (Ibert et al., 2015; Lange et al., 2020).…”