Page - 23 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

1 Introduction One could argue that what ultimately distinguishes humans from other species on this planet is our creativity. It has given us the unique ability to shape our own destiny, whether for good or bad. Creativity has enabled us to shape the present, recreatewhat camebeforeusandbuild the future thatweenvision forourselves.As aspecies,wecanvisualise things thatdonotexist, allowingus tobring themto life, changing theworld.Forexample, for some time,variouscreativity techniques, such as freeassociation, forced relationshipsandattribute listing, andparameter analysis, have been used as ways to generate ideas among entrepreneurs and their teams. Today’s organisations operate in an increasingly competitive and globalised envi- ronment, making creativity a crucial part of organisations (Amabile and Khaire 2008; Landry 2017). In addition, this competitive and globalised environment has now become digitised. Pervasivedigitisation is not onlyopeninganewwindowofopportunitybut also changes theway inwhich ideas are generated and how creative tools are applied. Creativity fuels big ideas and opens the door for new opportunities while chal- lenging employees to think creatively by tapping into their creative outputs. Through accommodating the creative ideas of employees, the company can con- tinually innovate its products and services to sustain a competitive advantage (Soltanifar 2016). The importance of creativity has grown throughout the years, withcompanies focusingon itmoreeachyear.For instance,basedonIBM’s survey ofmore than1500chief executiveofficers, creativityhasbeen rankedas thenumber one factor for futurebusiness success (Landry2017).A2018Deloitte surveyof500 companies—eachwith revenues somewhere between $100millionUSD and over $1 billion annually—found that approximately 57%of companies of this size plan on spending even more on tech in the years ahead than they have in the past (Deloitte 2018). Although creativity has been present in research and practice for many years (Gabora 2013), resulting in extensive research on creativity (BritishCouncil 2020; Said-Metwaly et al. 2017; Banaji 2010), the majority of studies still focus on the traditionalways of stimulating creativity, asmentioned above. Creativity, as such, has not changedmuch, though its surrounding landscape has changeddramatically through the increasingly digitised business environment (Johnson 2016). Tradi- tional techniques of stimulating creativity have been replaced and enhanced by technology-driven tools, such as virtual rooms, decision cockpits, various com- munication tools and interactive dashboards. In particular, the Internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) have an impact on the creativityof entrepreneurs and their teams,which is the focusof this chapter.These tools can enhance creative processes. For example, AI can be used to uncover certain statistics and help determine marketing opportunities, which can be more efficient and diverse compared with traditional practices. Furthermore, the use of the IoT has nowmade it possible for ideas to be sourced fromvirtually anywhere, going beyond the capabilities of manpower. This impact is seen in the hiring of 24 R. D. Hisrich andM. Soltanifar