Group Creativity – Innovation Through Collaboration

Even though there has been increasing awareness of the importance of social, cultural, contextual, and organizational factors in creativity, there has thus far been much less systematic focus on the group processes related to creativity. This is a serious deficit because increasingly, creative achievements require the collaboration of groups or teams. Fortunately, recently there have been a number of significant contributions relevant to an understanding of group creativity. We have brought these together in one volume to focus attention on this developing literature and its implication for theory and application. We have drawn contributions from a broad range of perspectives. The literature relevant to an understanding of group creativity has evolved along with a number of different lines in different areas of study and disciplines. Researchers come from the diverse traditions of cognition, groups, creativity, information systems, and organizational psychology. Creativity and cognitive researchers have examined the role of social and cognitive influences on the creative process. Organizational researchers have examined team innovation, organizational learning, and knowledge transfer. Group researchers have studied group brainstorming, and information systems scholars have examined brainstorming by means of computers. Other group scholars have examined the role of minority influence on creativity and information exchange in groups. The contributions from these different fields will facilitate the integration of the various findings and theoretical models into a general framework of group creativity.

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