Creativity in Information Systems - Minitrack Introduction

With the innovation rate in most markets increasing, an organization’s ability to sustain creativity in its products, processes and members becomes a significant competitive challenge. Because information technology (IT) has often been considered an innovation enabler, many organizations are now looking for IT to support their creativity needs more directly. Accordingly, the Creativity in Information Systems Minitrack is interested in exploring when and how creativity can be sustained or enhanced by IT. Moreover, because creative systems are thought to come from creative people, this Minitrack is also in interested in exploring ways to support the creativity of IT personnel. Not only are they continually seeking new ways to enhance system acceptance, productivity and satisfaction, but IT personnel are becoming increasingly interested in developing systems to enhance users’ creativity. Hence, understanding which tools and techniques best support creativity can be useful for application development. Because of the quality of this year’s submissions, we are expecting very lively and interesting sessions. Session one examines a variety of idea generating techniques and offers insights into how they may best be used to support creativity within organizations. The first paper, by Thomas Chesney and Helen Fletcher, looks at the efficacy of keyword analysis to support idea generation for systems reengineering applications. The second paper, by Eric L. Santanen, Robert O. Briggs and Gert-Jan de Vreede, not only shows how the Cognitive Network Model can be a useful guide for explaining the effectiveness of creativity support tools, but also introduces a new and successful group support tool known as directed brainstorming. The third paper, by Ben Sheiderman, discusses design and graphical layout considerations for developing programs to support users’ creativity as they compose documents, presentations, and other creations on their computers. Session two explores how individuals use information to perform more creatively. The first paper, by Paula J. Hinds, is an experiment designed to examine how asking individuals to suppress information, or protect proprietary information, inhibits their ability to think creatively. This paper was also submitted as the Creativity in Information