Best Paper Award for paper "Creativity as Service: how creative agents facilitate a liminal experience"

Natalja Laurey, Hans Berends and Marleen Huysman received a Best Paper Award from the Technology, Innovation and Management Division of the Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2017, in Atlanta, USA. Papers receiving this award belong to the top 10% of all accepted papers in the program. The paper will be published in the conference Proceedings. Their paper, titled “Creativity as Service: how creative agents facilitate a liminal experience”, aims to elaborate organizational theory on creativity. So far organizational theories on creativity discuss how creative agents enable creativity in situations that demand closure, such as the production of a music record, and therefore focus on creative agents' integrating efforts. Based on a qualitative research, this paper explores how creative agents foster creativity in an open-ended context, where no concrete results are achieved, such as exploratory innovation projects. It is argued that creative agents put efforts in keeping projects open-ended, by offering their clients an experience of 'in-betweenness', a liminal experience, that generates potentialities for creative change at a later moment instead of immediate results at the end of projects.