STARTING FROM THE NEW OR THE OLD? A STUDY ON HOW INDIVIDUALS CREATIVELY PROCESS INFORMATION IN PROBLEM FRAMING

In an environment that is increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, individuals who undergo the innovation process need to manage a large quantity of information and various cues. To make sense of these, framing becomes paramount. Through framing, individuals activate schemas that support the interpretation of the environment. To activate schemas and manage the complexity, individuals need to direct their attention to only a selection of cues. Literature has shown that individuals can direct their attention by attending cues that resonate with knowledge schemas that they expect to find (i.e., top-down), or by being driven by cues only (i.e., bottom-up). These directions of attention determine which creative logics – i.e., thought modalities – are involved in problem framing. Despite theoretical literature has highlighted the interaction between framing and attention, and creative logics, the way this interaction works remains largely underexplained. With an ethnographic study, we uncover the way attention is directed and the way it triggers creative logics. Specifically, we shed light on a third attentional direction that we call middle-out that describes a dynamic interaction between top-down and bottom-up. Moreover, we open the black box on how the different direction of attention triggers different creative logics. Namely, associative thinking is triggered by bottom-up and middle-out directions. Instead, abductive reasoning is triggered by bottom-up and top-down directions. Finally, associative thinking is triggered by top-down and middle-out directions.