CeDEx Seminar - Glenn Dutcher (Ohio University)

Creative capital generation: the role of diverse teams, experience, and communication

The capacity to create is vital to many organizations’ success, yet we know very little about how this capacity is generated or maintained. Our study uses a carefully controlled experiment to show that, relative to a baseline where only learning-by-doing is present, creative capital generation through communication alone is ineffective; however, face-to-face engagement on the task within a diverse team works quite well. Latent semantic analysis indicates that diversity is key because teammates’ ideas tend to cross-fertilize during face-to-face engagement. Our study is the first to explore human capital determinants of creativity in economically meaningful settings and suggests newly discovered benefits of teamwork in this setting, and challenges generalizations made outside of the creative framework.