Research pick: Creativity 4.0 and digital collaboration - "The Creativity 4.0 framework: outlining the influences on creativity in the digital era"

Digital technology and innovation is reshaping our world. It affects how we live, work, learn, and socialise. Everyone with access to a smartphone or computer has near-instantaneous access to almost unlimited information and every topic imaginable. They have the potential to connect with friends and family across the globe, and can even address politicians, organisations, celebrities, and others at the tap of a screen or the click of a mouse.

Within this brave new world, creativity is critical, especially when it is collaborative. Writing in the International Journal of Business and Systems Research, a team from Italy discusses how the co-evolution of human society, technology and creativity are all intertwined. The researchers, Carmen Bruno and Maria Rita Canina of the Department of Design at the Politecnico di Milano, in Milan, present Creativity 4.0 a new framework that can support the different steps of the design process as well as identify the necessary conditions that allow creativity to bloom in the digital age.

The research alludes to the “emerging ubiquitous and invisible technology”, which we are seeing in more and more areas of life such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, and robotics. These are all transforming what skills individuals need to live and work in the so-called digital economy. Indeed, the team writes, it is more than that “what makes this digital transition different, is the combination of disruptive transformative digital technologies, tools, processes and most importantly people culture, skills, and mindset.”

The World Economic Forum predicted that the new collaborations between humans, machines, and algorithms in the work environment will create countless new roles, perhaps even allowing humanity to shed undesirable routine work.

“Digital technology is, therefore, a critical piece of the digital transition as well as the development of a creative and proactive approach for anticipating the foreseeable opportunities as well as the threats offered by the technological evolution, guiding the adoption and application of such disruptive technologies,” Bruno and Canina write.

Bruno, C. and Canina, M.R. (2022) ‘The Creativity 4.0 framework: outlining the influences on creativity in the digital era’, Int. J. Business and Systems Research, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp.144–162.