Goal

Creativity enables us to adapt and innovate in the face of unpredictable changes in the external world. World problems such as climate change and pandemics push us to innovate under very uncertain and unforeseen conditions. These innovations often rely on individuals working together towards a shared goal, dealing with different levels of uncertainty.
Nonetheless, we know very little about how collaborative creativity in the real world is affected by uncertainty. To understand this, we need to answer a number of important questions: how do we collaborate and innovate amidst different levels of uncertainty? How can we measure creativity amidst uncertainty in humans, animals and machines? How does individual creativity relate to group innovation amidst varying levels of uncertainty? What are the characteristics of successful innovation groups amidst different levels of uncertainty?
The goal is to discover the basic mechanisms, develop and test new interdisciplinary strategies in collaborative creativity amidst uncertainty, and launch a programme applying these new principles of collaborative innovation to accelerate creativity in groups to solve real-world issues (which are inherently uncertain and complex).

Opportunity

Creativity has been studied in several fields including (but not limited to) neuroscience, psychology, computer science and mathematics. Each of these areas has contributed to our knowledge of creativity in unique ways, especially regarding individual creativity. Nonetheless, knowledge produced so far has rarely been successfully transferred to the real world to work on complex problems amidst high levels of uncertainty.
Investigating collaborative creativity under varying levels of uncertainty requires an interdisciplinary and transformative approach. This approach can reveal how uncertainty affects creativity from single organisms working alone (humans, animals, machines), together (collaborative creativity) and the complex interaction between these levels.

Roadblocks

Most studies in the field have adopted measures (like divergent/convergent thinking) which were developed over 40 years ago. Despite their popularity, these measures struggle to capture creativity in the real-world; this is a particular problem for collaborative creativity, which is essential for real-world innovations.
Most researchers in the creativity field focus on either the individual or the group under the lenses of a single field. Bringing these approaches and disciplines together is a significant challenge.
The need for well-controlled studies on creativity makes the translation of this knowledge harder since creativity happens dynamically in complex social settings.

Breakthroughs Needed

A series of workshops would be proposed to match researchers from different fields focused on the development of new creativity paradigms suitable to evaluate creativity in individuals and groups (human, animals and machines) under uncertainty. These will lead to a set of interdisciplinary studies to develop and validate a number of different paradigms.
These studies will enable us to establish at least three interdisciplinary creativity labs (including cutting-edge multi-person facilities) which will be dedicated to developing interdisciplinary research on creativity amidst uncertainty. They will reveal the basic principles of successful interactions amidst uncertainty (modelling the network properties), from simpler organisms (animals) to humans working alone and in groups.
To translate this to the real world, groups working on problems with high levels of uncertainty (e.g. climate change) will be matched with the research labs. The principles observed during the earlier stages will be applied to these groups to solve the current real-world (large-scale) problems. Creativity will be targeted both at the individual level (e.g. scientists solving specific problems) and at the collective level (e.g. organizational structures). The interaction between the levels will also be targeted. A new and unified theory of creativity amidst uncertainty will emerge from these interactions.

Key Indicators of Success

3 years: successful new collaborations are running; modern and innovative paradigms of creativity amidst uncertainty should be developed based on interdisciplinary knowledge.
5 years: these new paradigms should be robust and valid for individual and collaborative creativity. Three new interdisciplinary creativity labs are running innovative research using the new paradigms.
10 years: successful scientific/organizational collaborations for creativity in the real-world are running smoothly. New theories of creativity are tested and successfully applied to solve a real-world problem (e.g. climate change).

Additional Information

This research idea reflects the collaboration between different disciplines, including cognitive neuroscience and psychology (Dr Caroline DB Luft and Prof Joydeep Bhattacharya), computational creativity (Prof Geraint Wiggins), complex systems and networks (Prof Vito Latora), and comparative cognition (Prof Nicola Clayton, Dr Nathan Emery). This multidisciplinary team could advise in the and run projects in this area since they all have a strong background on their respective fields and have been developing research closely associated with creativity and innovation. This research idea calls for interdisciplinarity and we believe this team reflects a broad range of disciplines which should work together to reveal how uncertainty affects creativity in different levels (animals, humans and groups). Five representative publications from these collaborators are listed below:

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1811465115
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.116311
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-10213-0
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2006.04.009
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.01.008