Research

Creative industries produce many one-hit wonders who struggle to repeat their initial success and fewer hit makers who sustain success over time. To develop theory on the role of creativity in driving sustained market success, I propose a path dependence theory of creators’ careers that considers creators’ whole portfolios of products over time and how their early portfolios shape their later capacity to sustain success. The main idea is that a creator’s path to sustained success depends on the creativity in their portfolio at the time of their initial hit—relatively creative portfolios give creators more options for leveraging their past portfolios while adapting to market changes, increasing their odds of additional hits. I tested the proposed theory using an archival study of the U.S. music industry from 1959–2010, including data on over 3 million songs by 69,050 artists, and the results largely support the hypotheses. Artists who reached their initial hits with relatively creative (novel or varied) portfolios were more likely to generate additional hits, but a novel portfolio was less likely to yield an initial hit than was a typical portfolio. These findings suggest that new creators face a tradeoff between their likelihood of initial versus sustained success, such that building a relatively creative early portfolio is a risky bet that can make or break a creator’s career.

Past research on idea implementation has focused on employees trying to win social support for their own ideas, yet employees are often handed ideas to implement that were developed by others. We propose and test hypotheses on such handoffs, focusing on how handing employees relatively mature ideas to implement may lead them to build less creative final products. We tested our hypotheses using two studies: an archival study of 5,676 movies in the U.S. film industry and a complementary experiment. Results suggest that late handoffs yielded less creative final products than no or early handoffs, meaning it was costly to creativity when employees implemented relatively mature ideas without driving at least some of their prior development. However, “serialized late handoffs” — wherein implementers were handed relatively mature ideas after an earlier handoff between two other individuals — were less costly to creativity than late handoffs from one other individual. Mediation results suggest that late handoffs reduced implementers’ creativity by restricting their sense of psychological ownership and the coherence of their final products. This research advances theory on idea implementation, handoffs, and psychological ownership in creative work.

While creative ideas are defined as both novel and useful, novelty and usefulness often diverge, making it difficult to develop ideas that are high in both. To explain this tradeoff between novelty and usefulness and how it can be overcome, this paper introduces the concept of the “primal mark”—i.e., the first bit of content employees start with as they generate ideas, which anchors the trajectory of novelty and usefulness. In four experiments, participants started with primal marks that contained varying degrees of novelty. Results suggest that familiar primal marks foster usefulness at the expense of novelty, while new primal marks foster novelty at the expense of usefulness. However, the results also suggest a solution to this tradeoff: integrative primal marks that combine new and familiar content, fostering an optimal balance of novelty and usefulness. Implications for theory and research on creativity in organizations are discussed.