This dissertation examines an underexplored type of innovation - the discovery of new resources. Schumpeter distinguishes among five types of innovation: new products, new processes, new organizations, new markets, and new resources. Most prior work has focused on the first three types of innovation. This study focuses on the last type of innovation, the discovery of new resources, in creative industries where talent is the most important resource of creativity and profit. This dissertation is comprised of three chapters. Each of the chapters examines a strategy or an environmental change such as unbundling, digitalization, and cross-border acquisition which may facilitate or weaken the discovery of new talent and experiment with new artists. In the first chapter, I explore the impact of unbundling on the discovery of new talent. The results highlight the trade-off between breadth-oriented experimentation (experimenting with more new alternatives by producing unbundled products) and depth-oriented experimentation (collecting more accurate information on fewer alternatives by producing bundled products) and suggest that unbundling may facilitate firms’ breadth-oriented experimentation and the discovery of new talent. In the second chapter, I investigate whether digitalization (digital market) facilitated the discovery of new talent by entrepreneurial firms. Digitalization offers diverse niche opportunities from a long-tail market and decreases the cost of experimenting with new artists. However, the findings from this chapter suggest that entrepreneurial firms did not benefit from such opportunities; iTunes and YouTube did not facilitate entrepreneurial firms’ discovery of new talent and experimentation with new artists (compared to incumbent firms). In the third chapter, I turn to look at the impact of foreign ownership or capital on the discovery of new domestic talent. The “liability of foreignness” argument suggests that foreign ownership may weaken the discovery of new talent from the host country because foreign owners may lack a good understanding of the host country culture. This study analyzes the case of Sony’s acquisition of CBS Records (a US major label) in 1988, which is the first merger by a Japanese firm with a firm of a distant culture. The results suggest that Sony did not undermine CBS Records’ discovery of domestic new talent but instead increased the popularity of new domestic artists in CBS Records and its subsidiaries.

This paper investigates the intersection of well-formed structures in music with neurocognitive structures and responses in expert musicians. As musicology has explored musical structures to great length, and neuroscience has begun exploring the neural structures that underscore musical experiences, little research has been done to investigate how functional differences in music structure relate to neural structure. As the overwhelming majority of professional performing musicians have regular contact with music structures in applied and theoretical contexts, it is of interest to understand how the functions of these music structures correlate with neurocognitive structures when listening to or performing music. Furthermore, this work aims to explore how experience with improvisation drives the relationship between the function of musical structures and its neural correlates. This work is motivated by the idea that improvising musicians regularly employ techniques to change the prescribed music structure to fit the dynamics of the musical environment. This implies that expert improvising musicians may view the function of musical structures differently from musicians who do not interact with music structure in such a way. As such, an EEG experiment was conducted to investigate this relationship. Forty-one musicians performed an oddball task where they listened to 3-chord chord progressions, responding to any and all oddball chord progressions on a computer keyboard. The middle chord could be an exemplar oddball (an inversion of standard chord) or a functional oddball (a different class from the standard chord). The results found that musicians with more improvisational experience produced a greater response to functional deviants, indicating that improvisation experience plays a role in what category of structural information is more prevalent to the musician. These results were consistent across behavioral and neural measures, which were also correlated with one another. Chapters 1 and 2 provide background on music structure, improvisation, neuroscience, and the intersection of the three. Chapters 3 and 4 explain the experiment and the results. Chapter 5 integrates these results into the larger questions regarding improvisation, creativity research, and considers the pragmatic applications of improvisation training. Finally, this paper proposes another study that addresses deeper questions about neural and music structural correlations.

Creativity often involves combining existing ideas and knowledge in novel ways. As such, individuals’ access to diverse information and knowledge via social networks has been considered an important determinant of creativity. In this dissertation, I propose another factor to explain why some individuals are more likely than others to generate creative ideas: their ability to bridge disconnected cultural frames inside their organization. I draw on the cultural holes argument (Pachucki & Breiger, 2010) that cultural frames are connected through the persons that employ them (DiMaggio, 1987), and disconnections between cultural frames (i.e., cultural holes) can inhibit the exchange of ideas and knowledge among individuals. Thus, I conceptualize organization’s culture as a cultural network where the nodes represent the cultural frames its members use and the connections between two nodes represent the overlap of their users. I argue that while cultural holes inside an organization can present barriers for the exchange of ideas and information for those that do not share cultural referents, they also create opportunities for generating novel ideas for those that can bridge them. Bridging cultural holes, or cultural brokerage, enables individuals to utilize a wider range of information that is available, and recognize opportunities and combinations of information that others may not be able to see. The heart of this dissertation is this notion that individuals’ position in the cultural network and the patterns of cultural frames they use affect the diversity of information and knowledge they can process and as a result, their ability to generate creative ideas. In Chapters 3 and 4, I test this theory in two very different contexts: (1) an e-commerce company located in South Korea; and (2) two executive MBA groups at a U.S. university. I employ novel methods for measuring individuals’ use of culture and map out the cultural networks as well as the cultural holes inside the organizations. In both studies, controlling for social network brokerage and cultural fit, I find that cultural brokerage leads to the generation of creative ideas. More specifically, individuals who use loosely connected cultural frames were more likely to generate creative ideas compared to those that use cultural frames that are cohesively connected. In Chapter 5, I explore the question of who becomes cultural brokers with data collected from the two studies introduced in Chapters 3 and 4. I find both personal and contextual factors that are associated with cultural brokerage. Overall, these findings provide insight into how individuals’ different use of their organization’s culture affect the diversity of information they can utilize inside the organization and as a result, their ability to generate creative ideas.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2007. Graduate Programme in Psychology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 125-139). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR38745

Thesis (M.A.)--Rutgers University, 2008. / "Graduate Program in Psychology." Includes bibliographical references (p. 28-39).

Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 104-111).

In an effort to enhance art education, and to garner a better understanding of the artistic individual, arts-based research emphasizing cognitive case studies, or process examination have been conducted; several should be noted for their contributions to this study. First, are the cognitive case studies conducted by Franklin (1989), Gardner (1997), and Gruber and Wallace (2001); second, are studies emphasizing artistic processes conducted by Beittel (1973), and Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi (1976). It is the author's contention that cognition, intuition, and sensory experience, contribute to the successful production of a work of art. A documented history of artsbased research has been conducted inside the classroom, therefore this dissertation focuses on the integration of cognitive, intuitive, and sensory aspects of the creative process utilized by an artist working in a natural setting. It is appropriate to characterize this research as a longitudinal study of the creative process utilized by the accomplished artist Noel Robbins. The author deems Robbins as "accomplished" having earned the highest academic degree, the Master of Fine Arts, and recognition from the artistic community at large. It is challenging for an individual that has been professionally trained as an artist to remain objective while conducting research within her respective discipline. Therefore, the author utilized a phenomenological approach incorporating data triangulation, along with peer and member checking. Robbins's artistic process was analyzed using the Evolving Systems Approach (ESA) developed by Gruber and his associates (2001), whereby purpose, affect, and knowledge were examined. Insights were sought concerning changes within Robbins's artwork over a 15-year period. Self-directed art production (Ulbricht, 2005, Wilson, 2005), termed by Wilson "the third pedagogical site" (p. 1), offers an alternative to the prescribed media/techniqueoriented artwork emphasized in the schools. This is consistent with Robbins's artistic process that the author analyzed. This author posits that it is only through continued micro-aesthetic investigations of artistic processes that art educators will be able to fully embrace Dewey's (1934) belief that the connection between art and its relationship to society and nature is not only an intellectual (conscious) bond, but also an intuitive and sensory connection as well. / text

A central problem in community colleges' developmental education programs concerns the over-emphasis on basic skills instruction to the possible exclusion of higher order thinking. Although the ability to read, write, and compute establishes an indispensable foundation for future academic success, basic skills instruction alone does not teach students how to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate ideas--all of which are imperative in the global, knowledge-based economy where creative thinking constitutes the primary form of capital. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to synthesize creativity research and developmental education by investigating the significance of creative thinking in developmental courses taught at Florida Community College at Jacksonville's Kent Campus. To fulfill the study's purpose, the researcher employed a qualitative research design and methodology through which she explored the perspectives and practices of twelve participants selected through stratified purposeful sampling. Representing different disciplines, the participants varied in their instructional classification (full-time versus part-time) and developmental teaching experience. Having designed a basic interpretive qualitative study, the researcher, as a human instrument, sought to understand the participants' perceptions regarding the importance of promoting creativity in developmental courses; the characteristics of classroom environments that facilitate creative thinking; as well as the instructional approaches and methods that foster such thinking. By triangulating the data collection through interviews, observations, and document analyses and by obtaining member checks of the interviews from the participants, the researcher endeavored to enhance the trustworthiness of the findings. Presented in the rich, thick description distinctive of qualitative analysis, the study revealed that the enthusiastic, caring, and learner-centered participants possessed the personality characteristics necessary for the cultivation of creative thinking among students. Despite being intended to promote the acquisition of basic skills, many of the participants' approaches and methods, particularly the use of personalized instruction, verbal praise, cooperative learning, and figurative language, could also be employed to establish learning environments that facilitate creative thinking. Upon reviewing the data, the researcher made recommendations designed to contribute to the limited body of knowledge about the synthesis of creativity research and developmental education. / text

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