A Core / Periphery Perspective on Individual Creative Performance

Acknowledgements The authors contributed equally. We gratefully acknowledge financial assistance from the EU Marie-Curie Intra European Fellowship Scheme (grant nr MEIF-CT-2005-011465), the IPGC (Innovation and Productivity Grand Challenge), the Mack Center for Technological Innovation at Wharton School, and the Stern School of Business (NYU). We are especially grateful to Paul Allison and Dean Keith Simonton for their precious insights. We also acknowledge helpful comments from our colleagues at Cass, Stern (NYU), and from participants at the 2005 EGOS Conference, Berlin. We finally thank Genever McBain and Jon Morgan for their assistance in editing and polishing the paper, and Daniele De Maria for assisting with data collection and analysis. All errors remain our own responsibility. ABSTRACT The paper advances a relational perspective to studying creativity at the individual level. Building on social network theory and techniques, we examine the role of social networks in shaping individuals' ability to generate a creative outcome. More specifically, we argue that individuals who occupy an intermediate position between the core and the periphery of their social system are in a favorable position to achieve creative results. In addition, the benefits accrued through an individual's intermediate core/periphery position can also be observed at the team level, when the same individual works in a team whose members come from both ends of the core/periphery continuum. We situate the analysis and test our hypotheses within the context of the Hollywood motion picture industry, which we trace over the period 1992-2003. The theoretical implications of the results are discussed.