Collective creativity
In the behavioral sciences, collective creativity, in analogy to collective intelligence, is the shared human ability to generate new ideas and solutions together in a creative process. It occurs when social interactions lead to new interpretations and discoveries which individual thinking could not have generated.
In a business context, enterprises try to tap the combined creativity of their employees and how this creativity can be managed and tapped so as to create innovation.
A more natural fostering environment for collective creativity, however, can be found in the sciences, arts and literature where a certain degree of unmanaged self-organization can take place. Musical collective improvisation is an outstanding exemplification of artistic collective on-the-spot creation. Academic conferences can be breeding grounds for development of new scientific ideas.
Several components have been identified as the basis of collective creativity, with diversity from and thus even controversial ideas among the contributing individuals being one of the most prominent ones.
A similar concept can be found in distributed creativity that emphasizes the potential "scatteredness" of the contributing individuals.
Social collaboration as a collective creative processes has been found to thrive on the "edge of chaos".