Supporting Creative Teams in Organizations: An Approach Based on Technology

The purpose of this study is to explain why the use of information technology (IT) is so limited in supporting creativity in organizations and to propose an IT-based Creativity Support System (CSS). The authors analyze the main literature on creativity and critically review the existing technologies for creativity. It emerges that current IT applications either provide very little support to the cognitive processes of a creative team or are inapplicable to organizations. The proposed CSS is based on the idea that technology can take part in an iterative process where each team member contributes to recombine information until a new idea emerges. The CSS is presented with a practical example of application in a new product development process.

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