Context-Aware Creativity Support for Corporate Open Innovation

This article discusses how creativity in corporate Open Innovation processes can be supported by IT, especially regarding the situative long- and short-term social context of users. Therefore, the authors first define and formalize a model for creative processes. From evidence gained through qualitative interviews with managers from companies of the German ITC sector, they derive insights on creative situations and contexts as well as the current state of IT support for creativity in these companies. On the basis of these insights and guided by the design science methodology, the paper shows the development of a social-software based creativity support system and infrastructure. Furthermore, the authors discuss how appropriate IT tools can incorporate situative and social contexts for creativity support. Examples are a tabletop-based interface for co-located creativity and a web-based, mobile-enabled interface for distributed creativity. As a partial evaluation of the ideas, the article concludes with an experimental comparison of different interfaces to a non-IT scenario.