An Individual Psychology of Novelty-Seeking, Creativity and Innovation

What does it take to generate something new? The desire to seek something

new, the satisfaction of finding something, sharing these findings with

others who also recognize them as new - these are key ingredients of

generating a novelty. Part One of this book proposes a model of the

novelty generation process based on an analysis of psychological theories,

most importantly drawing from neuropsychology and social psychology.

This Novelty Generation Model (NGM) clearly distinguishes three

components: novelty-seeking, creativity and innovative performance. It is

meant to provide a basis for better understanding the links between these

particular components and identifying what interferes with and what

facilitates each of them. Practical advice is also generated on this basis that

is relevant not only for the novelty-seekers themselves, but also for their

social environment that may want to support them. Highly creative

professionals are often only loosely affiliated with organizations, while much

of the current scientific literature on creativity and innovation focuses on

individuals in tighter employee relationships and teams in organizations.

This book presents an individual work psychology for those settings

where creative professionals (be it artists, scientists or inventors) see

organizations (e.g. publishers or universities) more as service-providers to

their own work. In such comparatively free professional settings other

support issues seem to become more relevant: For instance grants and

awards conferred to individuals. These phenomena that have not yet

been paid attention to in the psychological literature on creativity and

innovation, are given a place in this individual work psychology. Many

questions may be asked about grants and awards, whether they actually

support innovation is an important one. Part Two, the empirical part of

this book, among others presents a large-scale longitudinal study that

tests some more specific hypotheses on the relationship between the

individual's innovative performance and winning awards and grants. The

study includes 1348 writers and poets that have received grants and/or

awards in the German-speaking publishing area.