Does one Creative Tool Fit All? Initial Evidence on Creativity Support Systems and Wikipedia-based Stimuli

Creativity is important to all kind of organizations, because creative capacity can help tackle complex challenges and navigate through the ambiguity of wicked problems. In Information Systems (IS) research, this topic is addressed by studies on creativity support systems (CSS). One promising approach is to provide (context related-) stimuli to individuals in order to inspire new and useful ideas. The relatedness of a stimuli, which means the degree to which a stimulus is related to a topic (i.e., to the creative task), is a vital characteristic. We investigated in the relationship between Wikipedia-based searching results (computational relatedness) and individual cognition (individual relatedness). Our initial findings show that there can be differences between individuals based on demographic variables. We further suggest a laboratory experiment in order to contribute to a CSS that takes individual relatedness and thus custom-fit stimuli into account.