The Opportunities and Challenges of Technology Driven Creative Collaborations

The onset of the 21st century is marked by deep psychological and sociological transformations affecting every scale of human endeavor, ranging from individual to crowd behavior. Deep and central to these transformations is the penetration of digital communication and computer technology into modern day life. Above all, this new and evolving technological landscape has opened exciting new possibilities to drive creative behavior, organizational creativity and innovation through computer-mediated interactions. Such opportunities are met with equal challenges that need to be addressed in order to harness the full potential of massively distributed creative collaborations. This chapter will elaborate on the underlying trends that give rise to these opportunities and challenges and to what extent these trends will govern creativity and innovation in areas of organizational life such as business, education, science and design in the next 10 to 30 years.

Sustainable Blended-Learning in HEI

This chapter aims to demonstrate how PAOL - Unit for Innovation in Education, a project from ISCAP - School of Accounting and Administration of Oporto - Institute Polytechnic of Oporto, Portugal - prompted new educational initiatives and new learning scenarios at a Higher Education Institution. Furthermore, it will demonstrate PAOL’s lines of intervention through an extensive analysis based on the 6 years of experience that this unit has in the educational technology field; a project that began small but that, due to the force of innovation, has progressively conquered new adepts. Therefore the unit described in this chapter relates all these factors, as a whole, capable of attaining changes that influence mentalities and methodologies, overcoming cultural and technical barriers. This case study can serve as a catalyst, potentiating the creation of new multi-faceted projects in the scope of web technologies in higher education teaching-learning processes.

An Interdisciplinary Workshop for Business-Idea Generation

This chapter describes a workshop concept for small groups that aims at the qualification for creative business-idea generation in interdisciplinary teams of academics. The chapter’s aim is to provide a theory-based and application-oriented description of the workshop, including a first-hand report on implementation. The chapter will start with a description of theoretical contributions and underlying research results to illustrate the workshop’s framework. Then a description of the aims, methods and target group follows, as well as the organizational settings and training methods. Then the chapter will focus on the realization of the workshop. Finally, the workshop concept’s scope of application is discussed and summarized.

Cultivating Innovation through Social Relationships

In this chapter, social relationship patterns associated with outstanding innovation are described and explored. In doing so, the chapter draws upon the findings of 16 in-depth interviews with award-winning Australian innovators from science & technology and the creative industries. The interviews covered topics relating to various influences on individual innovation capacity and career development. For all of the participants, innovation was a highly social process. Although each had been recognised individually for their innovative success, none worked in isolation. The ability to generate innovative outcomes was grounded in certain types of interaction and collaboration. The chapter outlines the distinctive features of the social relationships which seem to be important to innovation, and ask which ‘social network capabilities’ might underlie the ability to create an optimal pattern of interpersonal relationships. The implications of these findings for universities play a key role in the development of nascent innovators.

Integrating Technology with the Creative Design Process

In our fast-paced world, it is necessary for organizations to continually innovate in order to stay competitive. At the same time, technology is continually advancing, and tools to facilitate work are frequently changing. This forces organizations to stay abreast of current technologies, and also puts pressure on employees to utilize the technologies available to them in order to devise innovative solutions that further the organization’s goals. To date, there has been little research on how such technologies may best be used to facilitate such creative performance. The present chapter addresses this gap by integrating a model of the creative process from the psychology literature with technology literature from engineering and information technology. This chapter examines how specific technologies may influence performance at each stage of the creative process, and provides specific recommendations for how technology may be used to facilitate the development of creative solutions.

A Benchmarking Study on Organizational Creativity Practices in High Technology Industries

Twenty two interviews were conducted with top management in these organizations. The interviews were made by telephone addressing specific strategies in three domains: creative management, creative people management, and creativity management. Results indicate that high technology organizations, dependent upon financial support, do not seem to concentrate on corporate innovation, and do not have alternatives to budget reductions made in R&D, due to the present financial crisis, in order to innovate. The remaining companies provided several suggestions as to the way corporate innovation systems can be built and sustained within the framework of the future European innovation policies, devoted to workforce development, the service sector and the SMEs.

The OLC Questionnaire

This chapter is centered on the psychometric qualities of the OLC questionnaire, which has the objective of measuring the orientation of organizational culture towards learning – a kind of culture that promotes creativity and innovation in organizations. Hence, it includes description and discussion of its conception, assessment of content validity and the main construct validity studies already carried out. Its bi-dimensionality in terms of internal integration and external adaptation processes and its potentialities for research and intervention are also discussed, as well as future research directions to continue its journey of validation.

Creative Management, Technology and the BBC

The past decade has witnessed increased attempts by managers, scholars and policy-makers to stimulate the creativity of organisations. The practice of stimulating organisational creativity has led to a paradigm shift known as creative management, the focus of which is to use these practices to achieve competitive advantages. Such creative stimulation can come in a variety of forms. These include identifying and influencing environmental conditions that can increase the chances for creating new and significant products or services. In order to stimulate creativity, current creative management literature proposes the use of technology as a disseminator of knowledge and ideas. This chapter offers a literature review of creative management and technology use for creativity. It next introduces a case study of how technology is used as a creative management tool at the BBC. The findings of the study indicate that although the BBC’s yearly revenues are under sustained pressure, the organisation has invested heavily in technology in order to maintain its high creative standing. In conclusion, supported by the findings of the case study, this chapter corroborates and further advocates the use of technology as a significant component of creative management practices.

Methods against Methods

This chapter intends to clarify some issues about the often misunderstood terminology of creativity and innovation methods. Following the train of thought outlined in this chapter, it is argued that neither creativity nor innovation is guided by a method. There are only methods against methods that can help the extraordinary individual to step faster and easier into a state of mind that is conducive to creativity, but which has no effect on whether the creative output becomes an innovation. In order to support this claim, three major reasons that seem to be responsible for making people believe that such methods for creativity and innovation exist are outlined here. Next, the chapter addresses the phenomenon of creativity and continues with a discussion on the systemic character of creativity and innovation. Finally it shows that there are no methods for creativity, but methods against non-creativity by explaining in particular how one of these methods against non-creativity works. What this chapter outlines here is a necessarily one-sided and partial view, aiming not to convince the readers of the correctness of the view, but rather to make them think by presenting one possible consistent approach.

Exploring Alternative Assessments to Support Digital storytelling for Creative Thinking in Primary School Classrooms

This chapter documents the use of digital storytelling as a teaching approach to facilitate the learning of creative thinking among students (aged 7 and 8) in a primary school setting. A constructive teaching approach is adopted to allow students to create their own digital stories based on an authentic experience and express their thoughts. The focus of this chapter is to show how a shift from traditional classroom assessment to more flexible, alternative assessment format facilitates higher level thought processes (e.g., creative thinking) and range of skills. Several issues and challenges of using alternative assessment in digital storytelling are explored and discussed. Findings suggest that digital storytelling may be effectively used as an approach to foster creative thinking. They also suggest that refinements to the assessment process are needed to make it more formative in nature.