Action-Oriented Narratives. How Creativity Emerges in Online Crowd Discussions

Using the concept of action-oriented narratives, we explain how creativity arise during an open innovation crowdsourcing event where the sole interaction amongst the crowd participants occurs through their online written contributions. In teams, creativity arises from narratives that offer a comprehensive problem representation, that provide a new framing of the problem, or that articulate constraints and cause-effect relationships. Such narratives help team members find common ground and new distinctions, which are then leveraged to elaborate innovative solutions. In contrast, our qualitative study of problem-centered discussions in a crowdsourcing event discovers that the narratives aimed at developing comprehensive problem representations, reframing the problem, or targeting problem constraints are more likely to lead to non-creative solutions. Creativity, instead, arises from narratives that are narrow, highlighting only one perspective of the problem, that reframe the initial problem while emphasizing the actors responsible for the implementation of change, and that outnumber constraints with a range of useful resources that could be brought to bear in many solutions. These characteristics make the action-oriented narratives, which allow problem solvers to suggest creative solutions that are robust enough to withstand eventual contingencies, without the effort of reaching consensus on the problem representation or finding common ground.