Research Summary
Research Summary
Managing in the Creative Economy
Description
In the early 21st Century, especially in developed economies, work increasingly makes use of specialized knowledge, skill, and talent and creates value through transformation of symbols and other intangible materials to achieve outcomes different from what has been seen before. In many business contexts, a work outcome (e.g., a car rolling off an assembly line) that surprises us is considered a 'quality problem.' This project examines work in which surprise is a favorable attribute of a work outcome, a primary source of its business value. We aim to discover how the need to create novel and valuable outcomes again and again leads to management processes, principles, and practices than are different from those required to create value through increasingly efficient production of similar outcomes.