Page - 25 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

improvements. Social networking services (SNSs)have alsohad amajor impact on creativityand thecreation thereof. Ithasbecomeespeciallyapparenthowlarge their impact has been and will continue to be when looking at the unprecedented and seemingly endless number of interactions taking place on these networks. With digital technologies, the possibilities for individuals to express themselves inexactly theway that theyseefit havebecomenearly infinite. Individuals cannow express themselves and showcase their talents without bounds and may connect with audiences that have similar interests. This phenomenonbecomes very evident on platforms such asMedium, Instagram andYouTube. All three platforms allow for future professionals, artists and amateurs to post content on these platforms and test the market for future business endeavours. An interesting perspective to con- sider is thatwhenmillionsof photos are taken anduploaded to Instagram, there are bound to be great creative shots as a result. The same could be assumed for the 500million tweets posted daily. The probability for great content and creativeness rises with frequency (Chamorro-Premuzic 2015). Before we present various ways to foster creativity by making use of digital technologies,wewill definecreativity andelaborate on the importanceof creativity for digital businesses. 2.1 DefiningCreativity Over the years, the process of defining creativity has led to the development of various perspectives. The areas of cognition, personality and the stimulation of creativity inpeoplewere themain focusofdefiningcreativity in the1950s to1970s (Mehta and Dahl 2019). Later, in the 1980s and 1990s, that focus shifted to the influence of environments and the social context of the creativity of individuals. In 2005, Cropley reviewed numerous attempts to classify creativity. One of themore notable attempts was of Joy Paul Guilford, American psychologist, stressing the importance of ‘divergent’ thinking in human psychology, noting the role of cre- ativity in successful technological andeconomicventures.Guilford settledon three elements of the variety of discussions about creativity: novelty, effectiveness and ethicality, and focused on people that demonstrated these characteristics and interactedwith otherswhile in a ‘creativity-friendly’ environment (Loveless 2002). Several reviews exist that help to define and theorise the nature of creativity. Dust’s (1999) review provides recommendations for achieving the goals of exploration, exploitation and explanation to achieve the main objective: the pro- motion of talent, innovativeness and creativity in thefields of science, technology and art. However, it is important to note that much of the work cited in various literature has been undertaken in the USA, UK and Europe, meaning we must acknowledge the possibility of ‘cultural saturation’ in Western concepts of cre- ativity, as it might lead to limitations in understanding the creativity of other cultures. A key point in defining creativity is whether to focus on unique and one-of-a-kind creative individuals, such asAlbert Einstein or Charlie Parker, who possess paradigm-shifting abilities in society’swayof knowing, or to focus on any 26 R. D. Hisrich andM. Soltanifar