[AISWorld] HICSS 51 CFP: Creativity in Teams and Organizations

[De Vreede, Triparna]

HICSS-51 MINITRACK PROPOSAL
Creativity in Teams and Organizations
In the “Collaboration Systems & Technologies Track”
Triparna de Vreede, Gert-Jan de Vreede, Isabella Seeber
University of South Florida
Introduction
Innovation is a critical force in organizational performance and survival. Changes in technology, globalization, and increased competition have all created an environment in which creativity and innovation are needed in order to cope with situational and economic pressures and frequent changes. Designers and Developers of organizational systems must therefore innovate almost continuously to keep the organization aligned with such changes. Creativity is a critical pre-condition for innovation. Generating novel and creative ideas are the key to innovation and growth in every organization today. Providing employees with tools to think creatively has been proven to increase innovation in organizations. Research shows that organizations, which have established skill-bases and tools for creativity, outperform the competition in terms of revenue, rolling out new products, innovation and growth. Though organizations deploy groups for most creative processes, there has been little research in the area of group creativity. Most creative research is focused on individual factors affecting creativity. Many challenges that arise from pursuing creativity in teams remain unexplored.

Short Minitrack Description
We seek papers to improve creativity and innovation through all phases of problem-solving:  Understanding a problem, devising potential solutions, evaluating alternatives, making choices, making plans, taking action, and after-action review.  We seek papers addressing creativity in all patterns of collaboration:  Generating ideas, converging on those deemed worthy of more attention, organizing ideas, evaluating ideas, and building consensus.  We also seek papers that suggest improvements for realizing creative ideas in the workforce as innovations, for an organization cannot benefit from its creativity until its ideas are implemented.

Thus, the “Creativity in Teams and Organizations” minitrack focuses on:
1.      Methods & techniques to improve creativity in co-located and distributed groups
2.      Creativity in crowds and through social media
3.      Systems and Technology for Enhancing Creativity
4.      Challenges and opportunities for creativity in teams
5.      Theoretical foundations for creativity at individual, group and organizational levels
6.      Practical approaches to foster creativity at individual, group and organizational levels
7.      The creation and implementation of innovations in organizations
8.      Factors affecting creativity in teams and organizations
9.      Building team-based organizations
10.  Creativity and innovation concepts, theories, and practices for product or service development.

Previous Minitracks
The topic of creativity has been a constant feature of the HICSS conference from HICSS-28 to HICSS-36 and HICSS-38, and HICSS-42 to HICSS-50. Previous minitracks at HICSS focused on creativity in IS functions and organizations. Whereas most papers on creativity presented at HICSS focused on creativity on an individual level, the proposed minitrack will continue the focus from HICSS-42-50 on creativity research at a group and organizational level. The minitracks from HICSS-42-50 were highly successful, attracting a significant number of submissions and attendants at the conference. At HICSS-43 and HICSS-49, a paper from the Creativity minitrack was honored as the best paper in the Collaboration Systems and Technologies Track. Finally, the proposed minitrack will carefully consider the creativity themes and topics from previous years, and build on them.

Creativity in other conferences and publications
Creativity in teams is a topic that is receiving increasing attention in recent years. Other conferences in which attention is paid to creativity in teams and organizations (although not always in the form of a specific minitrack) include SIOP, Group Decision & Negotiation, CRIWG, and AMCIS. To further illustrate the importance of research on creativity, the following quality academic journals and conferences are fully devoted towards the current theories and innovations in creativity. Such journals include Creativity Research Journal, Creativity and Innovation Management, and Journal of Creative Behavior and conferences include Creativity and Cognition Conference and Leadership and Creativity Conference.

Organization Support
The University of South Florida endorses their minitrack chairs both in terms of infrastructure and finances to organize this minitrack. Likewise, the University of Innsbruck endorses their minitrack chair.

Biographical Statements
Triparna de Vreede is an instructor at the Muma College of Business at the University of South Florida. She holds a PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She has published her research in the Journal of the Midwest Association for Information Systems and has presented numerous papers at HICSS and ICIS on social/psychological studies of collaboration-related phenomena. Currently, her research focuses on creativity in groups, crowdsourcing, and other collaboration-related phenomena.

Gert-Jan de Vreede is a Professor of Information Systems at the Muma College of Business at the University of South Florida. His research focuses on the design of transferable practitioner-driven collaboration processes, the facilitation of group meetings, and the application, adoption, and diffusion of collaboration technology in organizations. He is co-founder of the Collaboration Engineering field and co-inventor of the thinkLets concept. His articles have appeared in various journals, including Journal of Management Information Systems, Communications of the ACM, Small Group Research, DataBase, Group Decision and Negotiation, International Journal of e-Collaboration, Group Facilitation, Journal of Creativity and Innovation Management, Journal of Decision Systems, Simulation & Gaming, Simulation, and Journal of Simulation Practice and Theory. Since 1996, he has organized over 30 minitracks at HICSS.

Isabella Seeber is an Assistant Professor at the Information Systems Unit of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, from where she also received her PhD in Information Systems. She has published her research in Computers in Human Behavior, Group Decision & Negotiation, and has presented numerous papers at HICSS and ICIS on topics related to collaboration, learning, decision support, knowledge creation, and innovation.





Appendix – Concept Call for Papers


HICSS-51 Call for papers for the minitrack on:
“CREATIVITY IN TEAMS AND ORGANIZATIONS”
Part of the Collaboration Systems and Technology Track
of the Fifty First Annual
Hawai'i International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS)
Big Island - January 3-6, 2018

Papers are invited for the minitrack on "CREATIVITY IN TEAMS AND ORGANIZATIONS" as part of the Collaboration Systems and Technology Track at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS).

Innovation is a critical force in organizational performance and survival. Changes in technology, globalization, and increased competition have all created an environment in which creativity and innovation are needed in order to cope with situational and economic pressures and frequent changes. Designers and Developers of organizational systems must therefore innovate almost continuously to keep the organization aligned with such changes. Creativity is a critical pre-condition for innovation. Generating novel and creative ideas are the key to innovation and growth in every organization today. Providing employees, customers and partners with tools to think creatively has been proven to increase innovation in organizations. Research shows that organizations which have established skill-bases and tools for creativity outperform the competition in terms of revenue, rolling out new products, innovation and growth. Though organizations deploy groups for most creative processes, there has been little research in the area of group creativity. Most creative research is focused on individual factors affecting creativity. Many challenges that arise from pursuing creativity in teams remain unexplored.

This minitrack provides one of the key international platforms on which the following issues can be discussed:
1.      Methods & techniques to improve creativity in co-located and distributed groups
2.      Design and evaluation of platforms, systems, and technologies for enhancing creativity
3.      Challenges and opportunities for creativity in teams
4.      Theoretical foundations for creativity at individual, group and organizational levels
5.      Practical approaches to foster creativity at individual, group and organizational levels
6.      The creation and implementation of innovations in teams and organizations
7.      Factors affecting creativity in teams and organizations
8.      Building team-based organizations
9.      Multi-level issues of creativity in teams and organizations
10.  Research linking individual creativity to group level creativity and organizational level innovation
11.  Multi-disciplinary approaches to creativity
12.  Creative collaboration between business partners and customers (e.g. co-creation of products and services)

Thus, papers are welcome that contain original ideas on how to improve creativity and innovation through all phases of problem-solving:  Understanding a problem, devising potential solutions, evaluating alternatives, making choices, making plans, taking action, and after-action review. We seek papers that suggest methodical, technical, theoretical, or practical improvements for realizing creative ideas in the workforce as innovations, for an organization cannot benefit from its creativity until its ideas are implemented.

There are no preferred methodological stances for this minitrack: this minitrack is open to both qualitative and quantitative research, to research from a positivist, interpretivist, or critical perspective, to studies from the lab, from the field, design-oriented or developmental in nature.

Themes and topics of relevance to this minitrack include, but are not limited to (related topics not listed are especially welcome):

Creativity techniques and approaches
·         Creativity methods & techniques to improve creativity in co-located and distributed groups
·         Measuring the effectiveness of creativity techniques and approaches
·         Creativity in patterns of collaboration (divergence, convergence, organization, evaluation, and consensus building)
·         Reusability, trainability, predictability, and transferability of creativity techniques and approaches
·         Capturing best practices on creativity
·         Analyzing the nature of the evolving artifacts

Tools, technologies, and contexts to support creativity
·         Theories, guidelines, and strategies for designing creative technologies and systems
·         Proof of concepts – examples of breakthrough technologies and systems supporting creativity
·         Use of visualization tools for enhancing creativity
·         Role of HCI in creativity processes
·         Physical and electronic environments to support creativity
·         Idea management tools
·         Technologies that support creativity in specific critical collaboration processes, e.g.
·         Crowdsourcing
·         Focus groups
·         Delphi processes
·         Collaborative planning
·         Strategy building
·         Collaborative writing
·         Communities and Web 2.0
·         Mobile Creativity

Creativity in teams and organizations
·         Analyzing the nature of creative teams and its evolving processes
·         Training work group members and work group leaders to think and act creatively
·         Innovation management in collaborative contexts
·         Success factors for diffusing creativity techniques, approaches, and technologies in organizations
·         Factors affecting creativity in teams, organizations, and value networks
·         Building team-based organizations
·         Challenges and opportunities for creativity in teams
·         Practical approaches to foster creativity at individual, group and organizational levels
·         Theories on collaborative and organizational creativity
·         Studies on the efficacy of interventions intended to introduce creativity approaches and technologies in an organization
·         Personal and group traits affecting creativity
·         Enhancing creativity by appropriate knowledge management
·         Creativity in communities and user-generated content
·         Creativity in the “enterprise 2.0”
·         Creativity in ad-hoc-groups
·         Creativity in distributed work groups and processes

Theoretical issues in creativity and innovation
·         Theories of creative problem solving
·         Theories of creative decision making
·         Creativity in different socio-cultural environments
·         Effects of organizational culture on creativity
·         Frameworks for evaluating creativity in the field and in the lab
·         Theoretical approaches to understand the effect of individuals, teams, organizations, and the broader environment on creativity
·         Instruments and measurements for creativity and innovation
·         Group tasks to study creativity
·         Theoretical relationships between creativity and organizational productivity


MINITRACK COORDINATORS:
Triparna de Vreede (primary contact)
Information Systems & Decision Sciences Department
University of South Florida
tdevreede at usf.edu<mailto:tdevreede at usf.edu>

Gert-Jan de Vreede
Information Systems & Decision Sciences Department
University of South Florida
gdevreede at usf.edu<mailto:gdevreede at usf.edu>

Isabella Seeber
Information Systems Unit
University of Innsbruck
Austria
isabella.seeber at uibk.ac.at<mailto:isabella.seeber at uibk.ac.at>

The purpose of HICSS is to provide a forum for the interchange of ideas, research results, development activities, and applications among academicians and practitioners in computer-based systems sciences. The conference consists of tutorials, advanced seminars, presentations of accepted papers, open forum, tasks forces, and plenary and distinguished guest lectures. There is a high degree of interaction and discussion among the conference participants because the conference is conducted in a workshop-like setting.

Instructions for submitting papers:
1.      Submit an electronic copy of the full paper, 10 pages including title page, abstract, references and diagrams using the review system available at the HICSS site, make sure that the authors’ names and affiliation information has been removed to ensure an anonymous review.
2.      Do not submit the paper to more than one minitrack. The paper should contain original material and not be previously published or currently submitted for consideration elsewhere.
3.      Provide the required information to the review system such as title, full name of all authors, and their complete addresses including affiliation(s), telephone number(s) and e-mail address(es).
4.      The first page of the paper should include the title and a (max) 300-word abstract.

DEADLINES:
·         Anytime:   OPTIONAL: Abstracts submitted to Minitrack Chairs for guidance, indication of appropriate content and to receive instructions on submitting full paper.
·         June 15:    Full papers uploaded in the directory of the appropriate minitrack.
·         August 15:            Notification of accepted papers mailed to authors.
·         September 15:     Accepted manuscripts, camera-ready, uploaded; author(s) must register by this time.


==============================================
Triparna de Vreede PhD, MBA, MS-MIS
Academic Director, MS-Management Program
Visiting Faculty,  Information Systems & Decision Sciences
Muma College of Business
University of South Florida

Office: CIS 2077
Email: tdevreede at usf.edu
Phone: 813-974-1776 (office) 813-351-0011 (cell)
==============================================