| Organizations often want to enhance their employees' creative performance. This dissertation contains three essays addressing topics related to this desire. The first essay reviews the literature on creativity theories and creativity support systems, i.e., information systems designed to facilitate creative work. Based on the review, a new framework is developed to guide the design of single-user creativity support systems. The framework stresses that such systems should support a complete creative process and the motivational aspect of creative work. The second and third essays study the use of ideas and concepts as stimuli to support creative ideation, respectively. The second essay shows that exposure to an original idea increases idea originality but reduces number of ideas in crowdsourced ideation. In addition, original idea stimuli lead to less conformity than common idea stimuli. In the third essay, Wikipedia is used to automatically extract concepts that are related to a creative task to different degrees. Using this new approach of finding stimuli, the relationship between stimulus relatedness and creativity is studied. A theory of stimulated ideation is developed to explain this relationship. Experimental results show that a set of stimuli that are related to a creative task to different degrees increase idea originality. Practical implications and future research for all the essays are discussed. |
