:::: CreativeIT Community Wiki ::: Workshops :: Success Factors Workshop : Topic One: Success Factors Summary Success Factors Workshop Breakout Topics    Topic One: Success Factors Summary    Topic Two: Hard Questions    Topic Three: supporting community Material    MP3s of the presentations Proceedings of the NSF CreativeIT workshop at Arizona State University

Notes from group 1 Success Factors: What are the success factors in CreativeIT research or education?? Success Factors are an analysis of the success stories. What do we know about what was going on in these scenarios that led to their success? What makes creative individuals and teams successful? What should we study and how should we study it? What are some ways to know or study the success factors: Self-reflection, ethnography, cognitive studies, computational ethnography Ethnography: ethnographers go in and observe or participate and find categories or patterns, they describe the phenomena Things to look at for success factors: 1. People: individuals, relationships, passions/expertise 2. Organizational structure: loose enough to facilitate rather than to manage 3. Communication technology: what technology facilitates communication and analysis What is the range of cases that we want to study? For example: • We should study and facilitate the creation of the tools that are successful in changing the way people do things • Look at contrasting groups: successful and unsuccessful groups How can we build a culture that sustains creativity? We heard a lot of commonalities across the stories told at this workshop. While they are self reported, we have heard some themes. • Broker that manages the way credit is given, and to change the incentives to motivate people • Group diversity • Respect across the team • Complex problems • Being willing to share the credit • Problem was personally meaningful, they needed to be part of the group • Everyone had a stake in the success of the team • Stepping in and out of the group was OK and could make it work • Consider more than 1 (maybe 3) alternative • Creative leadership: the leader is respected as being creative • Resource availability, or alternatively, lack of resources Application of IT for the evaluation: how can we creatively bring technology to bear on the "in the moment" decision making process? Use technology to track movement of people, capture the emerging leadership, to track conversations for communication analysis Need a corpus of data to form a baseline for trying new approaches, designing new technologies What are success factors in education in art, architecture, creativeIT, etc. ?? No One wanted to answer this question because it is hard to know what is successful education, so how can we know what the success factors are? The difference between the creative individual and creative team is how the creativity is propagated. What communication blocks the creativity? NOTES FROM GROUP 2 THINGS TO LOOK AT IN THE SUCCESS STORIES: Funding structure many of existing success stories not funded by NSF funded by patrons, gift economy what does that mean for the funding future? Study the infrastructure and institutional structure that supported it Educational structures - curricula Evaluation and Reward structures Look at stories of failure Look at mission and purpose that drove it Look at self motivation of individual participants Look at role of real world constrains – the role of insistent reality WHAT TO BE CAREFUL ABOUT – PROTECT FROM Protect from current success stories defining success factors for ever Resulting factors should be starting point - Dynamic evolving Be aware that factors are contextual – they will not apply to everything Don’t connect tools to success – simplification (this includes technology – don’t say this technology makes people creative) Avoid check lists METHODOLOGY Layered studying From social creativity, to cases (finding multiple cases), to case studies to factors to comparative studies of factors to scalable, dynamic evolving definitions Defining categories Do we need categories for finding the cases? Link domains/categories to the hard questions How do we bundle Process Creativity occurs in bursts; the process of capturing institutionalized creativity needs to be consistent with the nature of creativity Some of the process must be informal – some rigorous, some playfull . Last modified 20 January 2008 at 3:28 pm by haleden