Renowned Scholar Professor Ann Majchrzak visits CBS

Collective Creativity
This talk traces the speaker's body of work focused on information systems to foster collective creativity, defined as adhoc collectives with little past and future interaction possibilities being able to incorporate diverse perspectives to collaboratively and iteratively co-generate novel solutions to complex equivocal problems.

The speaker's early work was on the design of a decision support system to foster involvement of diverse perspectives in a corporation's move toward flexible automation, then moved to the design of virtual teams and virtual team technology to foster innovative problem-solving. The widespread introduction of wikis allowed for inclusion of employees enterprise-wide to participate in collective creativity. Online communities and crowdsourcing allowed for inclusion of people from outside the organization to participate in collective creativity. A series of insights from these bodies of research are shared. 

Most disappointing though is that collective creativity is rarely accomplished for the many reasons - from not-invented-here to the extent to which collective creativity represents a threat to management hierarchy.

Organized by:
Department of Digitalization