Organisierte Kreativität: Eine Synthese
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
This project contributes to the development of a multi-disciplinary theory of organized creativity by studying creative processes in the pharmaceutical and the music industries. The project reviewed and analyzed empirical data and findings from the DFG Research Unit "Organized Creativity" (FOR 2161) to identify cross-cutting themes as generic features of creative processes across different levels (i.e., project, organization, field) and across domains (i.e., arts and sciences). The two cross-cutting themes to consider were (1) the role of failure and (2) the role of space in creative processes. (1) A core insight of this review is that failure is one key organizing principle in creative processes, both in arts- and science-based projects, as well as in small, short, large and long projects. Yet, despite its ubiquity and varying importance in different contexts, there is little research on the role of failure in creative processes. This is not only because research on creativity is biased towards studying successful cases, but also because failure is still largely stigmatized and therefore difficult to study. Current research is mainly focused on identifying causes of failure and innovation barriers, as well as on how to learn from failure, assuming a definitional binary between failure and success. What is less explored, however, is how the dynamic relationship between failure and success and their respective interpretations is based on their contextual embeddedness, and thereby shapes the creative process. To explore these questions, the project collated the DFG Research Unit’s qualitative data as basis for a comprehensive analysis of failure in creative processes. In addition, the project combined this data with new interviews and observations to understand how failure is experienced and handled in creative projects of a specific field. We made two major findings. Firstly, to initiate and maintain creative projects, creative actors in both arts- and science-based projects rely on and negotiate three expectation dimensions: uniqueness, doability, and resonance. These dimensions can be seen as overarching social frameworks that influence and direct an individual's goals and aspirations, i.e., they are not isolated objectives that individuals set for themselves, but rather an expression of structural dynamics that shape and guide an actor’s experience throughout the creative process. We identified two generalizable responses of negotiating failure and setbacks within one or more of these dimensions in both fields. One approach is to temporarily prioritize one dimension over others. This means focusing more on achieving success in a specific area while allowing other expectations to be put on hold. Another way actors react to failure is by reframing their expectations, i.e., by modifying the interpretation of specific expectation dimensions to fit the current circumstances, hence pointing to the malleability of these dimensions. These insights allowed us to develop an understanding of failure that shifts the focus from researching the success or failure of producing a specific creative output towards understanding processes that keep the creative process going. (2) The second tier of our project addressed the notion of space in regard to creative processes in order to reflect on their diverse, more often than not metaphorical use in management and organization research in general and studies of creativity and innovation in particular. Until now, research on creativity and space has focused empirically on physical, social and virtual spaces that are explicitly dedicated and designed to facilitate and enable creative processes. Such co-working spaces, laboratories and studios, innovation hubs, or other spaces are likely to facilitate collaboration and knowledge exchange, and allow a sense of community and, thereby, enable creative processes. This research underlines that creative processes do not swirl around freely in time and space, but take place in ‘bounded social settings in which interactions among actors are organized in distinctive ways’ (Bucher & Langley, 2016, p. 595). These settings can be characterized as ‘in-between spaces’, which emerge in and across organizational boundaries. Our project analyzed a particular creative space – an innovation eco-system – and highlighted, on the one hand, the fact that creative spaces are not always and not necessarily the outcome of a particular creativity-initiative; they also emerge spontaneously and without intention, when for example, an enforced waiting time creates a new space to rethink existing ideas. On the other hand, creative spaces not only enable creativity through exchange and exploration, certain spatial constraints also provide a degree of permanence and consistency that maintains the creative process as such. This points to the crucial role of constraints in creative processes, which both enable actors to alternate procedurally between stability and fluidity and prevent them from doing so. The project synthesized previous research from the DFG Research Unit to solidify a multidisciplinary approach to organized creativity that moves beyond an output-orientated and binary understanding of creative achievement and its failure. This processual understanding of organized creativity clarifies that studies on creativity cannot limit their analysis to the individual, project or organizational level, but must take into account the social and spatial embeddedness of these processes within a particular field (conceived, for instance, as a project ecology or innovation ecosystem). This highlights that studying creativity and failure dynamically must emphasise both its collective, relational, and continuously evolving character and the socially and spatially constructed structures that organize the creation of novelty in distinctive, and more or less stable ways.
