Unpacking “Ideas” in Creative Work: A Multidisciplinary Review

Abstract

New ideas are central to a wide array of organizational phenomena and research that involve creativity and innovation. Yet, there is little consensus on what the concept of 'ideas' means, with a broad range of creative outputs being conceptualized as ideas. This fragmentation makes it challenging to compare studies and build a cumulative base of knowledge. To integrate different streams of organizational research, we reviewed papers across the creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship, design, knowledge creation, and network literatures. We propose a "wave-particle duality" framework of ideas to synthesize two distinct but complementary approaches to understanding and studying ideas. Our framework offers guidance on how to approach the study of ideas, reconciles apparent conflicts in the literature, and suggests opportunities for advancing our understanding of ideas in creative work.

Toward a Meta-Theory of Creativity Forms: How Novelty and Usefulness Shape Creativity

“…Viewing ideas as closer when they move towards implementation mirrors research on temporal psychological distance, which shows that events, plans, thoughts and actions are represented in an abstract form when they are far in the future 1 , and more concrete form when they are temporally close (Trope & Lieberman, 2010). Yet, ideas can also be generated and developed through a physical form (Hua et al, 2022)-that is, by physically or materially enacting the idea by engaging with material (Stigliani & Ravassi, 2018;Sawyer & DeZutter, 2009) or an embodiment of the idea (Heracleous & Jacobs, 2008;…”

“…Elaboration is defined as refining, clarifying, and checking a core idea to develop it further (Perry- Smith & Mannucci, 2017). This implies that through elaboration, ideas progress in a relatively linear way, from vague notions to more detailed and complete versions (e.g., Berg, 2019;Hua et al, 2022). Consider the example of writing a book described in the previous section.…”

Idea evaluation as a design process: understanding how experts develop ideas and manage fixations

“…Research has also found that ideas have different characteristics. They can act as mental representations that are often unelaborated and transmittable, but can also act as physical representations that are interpretable and communicable through action (Hua et al 2022). This means that ideas need to be both conceived and communicated, and ideas that are communicated by the idea creator can trigger further intellectualisation by person evaluating the idea, which can be continuous and emergent, and lead to the creation of new ideas or idea enhancements by the individual (Sosa 2019;Ulrich & Nielsen 2020;Sukhov et al 2021;Hua et al 2022).…”

“…They can act as mental representations that are often unelaborated and transmittable, but can also act as physical representations that are interpretable and communicable through action (Hua et al 2022). This means that ideas need to be both conceived and communicated, and ideas that are communicated by the idea creator can trigger further intellectualisation by person evaluating the idea, which can be continuous and emergent, and lead to the creation of new ideas or idea enhancements by the individual (Sosa 2019;Ulrich & Nielsen 2020;Sukhov et al 2021;Hua et al 2022). This conceptualisation challenges the understanding of idea evaluation as a decision gate, and points to the importance of elaboration, interpretation, clarification, and the creation of new ideas during evaluation.…”

“…Furthermore, some studies have pointed to the notion that experts can adopt different roles during idea evaluation. For instance, experts might fixate on the initial idea and use their knowledge to assess the potential of the initial idea concept, but they could also act as designers, recognising the idea’s hidden potential, reconceptualising it and finding a better path for the idea’s development (Sukhov et al 2021; Hua, Harvey, & Rietzschel 2022). However, at present, we have little understanding of how experts actually engage with ideas during evaluation, the extent of fixations during evaluation, and whether they are able to act as designers in a consistent manner.…”