Keynote Address: Beyond eureka moments: supporting the invisible work of creativity and innovation

Introduction. This paper is about the challenges of working creatively and reflectively in the informationintensive environments characteristic of our digital age. Method. The paper builds upon earlier work about uncertainty in library and information science by incorporating work exploring risk cultures and uncertainty as everyday phenomena. It presents arguments emerging from an ongoing investigation of the background work involved in scholarly research practice. These threads are used to invite discussion about the particular strategic contribution that the ISIC community might make in answer to calls for more creativity and greater support for the human spirit in all that we do. Analysis. Ethnographic material about scholarly research practice is combined with varied research exploring creativity and uncertainty. Results. Analysis of conditions that can stimulate creativity suggests that working through and being in uncertainty provides a site of creativity stimulation that addresses Howkins's query about how and where we wish to do our thinking. Conclusions. As information researchers and practitioners, we can act as stewards within our communities and help shape the information services and infrastructures that support organisations and communities striving to be more creative and to engage with information in inventive ways. Doing so will require us to not only support the creativity and innovation of others, but to be creative and innovative ourselves. Understanding moments of discovery and creativity This paper aims to carve out a space for ongoing conversations within the ISIC community about the challenges of working creatively and reflectively in the information-intensive environments characteristic of our digital age. In the 21st century, understanding information in context involves an appreciation of information, human behaviour and technology. The emergence of new information ecologies and workplace milieu like those described by Howkins (2009) and Florida (2001) call for new creative capacities. The challenge now before us is how to support creativity and innovation in these contexts; to engage with information and not to necessarily just be able to find it. By responding to these contemporary challenges information researchers and practitioners have an opportunity to take on a stewardship role, similar to the community technology stewards Wenger et al. (2009) describe. The metaphor of the eureka moment helps illustrate the instrumental role that information and more specifically the contexts of our engagements with information play in research, innovation and other markers of our creativity. The terms creativity and innovation are not formally defined in this paper but broadly fall within the scope of discussion within the Adelphi Charter (Royal Society 2006). The decision is consistent with the creative ecology portrayed by Howkins (2009: 9), who contends that creativity '...can be described but not defined and indeed has always been conditional'. Eureka moments, moments of sudden, unexpected discovery, can be found in popular literature as well as in discussions of research. Within the ISIC community, it is very likely that many of us have not only experienced such moments in our personal endeavours but have also been instrumental in helping someone else in the lead up to what they might describe as a eureka moment. Knoblich and Oellinger (2006 : 38) refer to these moments as 'sudden smart insights' when they describe how Einstein hit upon the core idea of his theory of relativity one night—a sudden realisation that took place after months of intense mathematical calculations. Anyone who has experienced a seemingly sudden discovery can also likely recall all the background work that would have contributed to such a moment. When we reflect on the lead up to such a moment, we notice that it really did not just come from nowhere. On the contrary, there was very likely much background work needed to make such a discovery possible. In this way, information and information mediators and facilitators, libraries and librarians can be instrumental in efforts behind the scenes that contribute to such moments of discovery. Star and Strauss (1999) write about going backstage to examine the embedded background work associated with highly visible public performance. A very visible eureka moment, we might argue, is the public performance, while the information work taking place in the background is the invisible work. Drawing attention to the significance of such background work makes more visible the impact of information and information service provision on research success. However, stories of discovery like that retold by Knoblich and Oellinger (2006) remind us that it is how one works with that information that can be the key factor. They make the point that Einstein's extensive knowledge of physics and his capacity for clear analytical thinking were important underlying factors in this discovery, but the decisive moment they describe arose out of his capacity to restructure the problem before him from a very new perspective. Howkins makes a similar point in his writing about creative ecologies, flagging the challenge of handling ideas and knowledge: The main question of our age is how we live our lives. As we struggle with this, we face other questions. How do we handle ideas and knowledge, both our own and other people's? What relationship to ideas do we want? Where do we want to think? (Howkins 2009: 1) Thus, it is not so much the access to information but our capacity to engage with that information in creative, imaginative ways that contributes to such success. It is about the spaces we want to carve out for ourselves and for the people we seek to support through our research and our professional practice. It is in this distinction that I believe there is great opportunity for us as information researchers and practitioners to become key players in the new creative information ecologies Howkins discusses. As a researcher within a multidisciplinary research centre, I have begun exploring issues of creative practice within the discourse of the cultural economy. Doing so has prompted me to delve deeper into the ongoing push/pull between critical thinking and creative thinking that I first witnessed in the ethnographic exploration of scholarly research (Anderson 2000, 2005) I first shared with the ISIC community a decade ago. In that earlier research, tensions were evident between my informants' capacity to plan and manage a project (what we might call planfulness (Gorrell et al. 2009: 457)), and their desire to make space for extemporaneous practice (the unplanned and what we might also refer to as playfulness). Both sets of practices are really important parts of research thinking and doing, making their potential pairing incredibly fruitful. How do we strike a balance between these? How are we to strike a balance between casting the net wide enough to exploit potentially valuable interdisciplinary and peripheral connections and narrowing explorations and analyses to reach research milestones? Is the way that information systems are designed actually constraining the divergent practices that seem to be associated with creativity and innovation and discovery? These questions are representative of an area of concern in which I feel that we as information researchers and practitioners need to be more active, and can be more active. In many ways, the ideas presented in this paper are the product of my own eureka moment in connection with the analysis of fieldwork I had collected about the information practices of scholarly researchers. Working initially with uncertainty as a concept in information science, I had a eureka moment. When preparing a paper for a social anthropology conference I encountered a special workshop on the anthropology of uncertainty that led to a fuller engagement with the anthropological discussions about the concept and the connection between uncertainty and risk (Anderson 2006). Over time, this evolved into an exploration of a curious triangle of connections between uncertainty, risk and creativity that has led me to tease out ideas raised by Bawden (1986), Ford (1999, 2004) and O'Connor (1988) about designing information systems to support creativity (Anderson 2010). This present paper builds upon this earlier work about uncertainty in library and information science by incorporating work exploring risk cultures and uncertainty as an everyday phenomenon (Anderson 2009). It presents four interlinked arguments emerging from an ongoing investigation of the background (and often invisible) work involved in scholarly research practice: engaging with uncertainty in information seeking offers a creativity stimulation pathway (Bawden, 1986); in contemporary practice, there is increasingly less time to think (Levy 2007); working through uncertainty and ambiguity is conducive to creativity; and the time and effort associated with managing large quantities of information can have a detrimental impact on creative thought. The intention is to reinvigorate discussion about the productivity of engagements with ambiguous and imperfect information and the potential contribution this offers in relation to creativity and innovation. Howkins (2009), Florida (2001) and Löfgren and Willim (2005) point to growing demands for creativity in the cultural economies of the 21st century. Making space for engaging with imperfect information and for being in uncertainty (rather than seeking to avoid it), I would argue, offers a way to respond to Howkin's (2009) question: where do we want to think. Further, I will use these four threads to invite discussion about the particular strategic contribution that the ISIC community might make in answer to calls for more creativity and greater support for the human spirit in all that we do. As an interesting aside, it is worth noting how the 'presentation order eff