Does knowledge reuse make a creative person more creative?

Pak Keung Cheung, Patrick Y.K. Chau, Anson K.K. Au

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In a business world that everything changes fast, continuous innovation become a key strategy for survival. Knowledge management, which deals with the effective transfer and reuse of knowledge and best practices within a firm, has been theorized as one of the facilitators of organizational innovation. Yet, no organizational innovation can be achieved without the creative performance of their individual employees. This paper examines the effect of the most common type of organizational knowledge management system, that is, an intranet-based knowledge repository, on the level of creative performance of an individual. A controlled experiment was conducted on more than a hundred individuals to investigate the quantitative and qualitative levels of creativity outcomes on an open-ended business task. Their levels of baseline creativity skills were also measured in order to inspect its interaction with knowledge reuse. The results suggest that knowledge reuse resulting from this repository type of knowledge management system actually inhibits the creative performance of individuals, especially on the qualitative dimension. Furthermore, this inhibiting effect is significantly stronger on an individual with higher baseline creativity skills, making a creative person performs less creatively than an otherwise unimaginative person.

Original languageEnglish
Pages338-349
Number of pages12
Publication statusPublished - 2005
Externally publishedYes
Event9th Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems: I.T. and Value Creation, PACIS 2005 - Bangkok, Thailand
Duration: 7 Jul 200510 Jul 2005

Conference

Conference9th Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems: I.T. and Value Creation, PACIS 2005
Country/TerritoryThailand
CityBangkok
Period7/07/0510/07/05

Keywords

  • Creativity
  • Knowledge management
  • Knowledge reuse

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Information Systems

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