Research
I’m a published creativity researcher and happy ex-academic. My PhD is in organizational behavior, a field of business management with foundations in social psychology and anthropology. Here’s an overview of my original academic research on the topic of creativity.
I conduct mixed-methods research, triangulating upon novel findings by combining experiments, quantitative analysis, archival studies, and qualitative research. I specialize in measuring constructs that are inherently hard to measure, like creativity, constraint, and culture. I’m good at finding needles of insight in haystacks of data.
Consumer Insights
I’m a design strategist. I understand innovation and business, so I start by setting the strategic vision and asking the right questions. My choice of methods follows from there.
I now do three main kinds of consumer insights research:
- need finding (qualitative)
- user experience research (qual/quant/lab)
- behavioral analytics (quantitative)
Great products address user needs. As a design strategist my job is to “get out of the building” and find opportunities for innovation by talking to potential users, reading between the lines to discover their needs, and observing them in their natural environments to see how their needs should be met. I collect insights and I’m very good at figuring out which insights are worth innovating upon, and which are duds.
Depending on the stage of the product and the company, my approach may include blank-slate need finding, problem identification, problem framing, consumer insights and concept validation. This may include interviews, surveys, ethnography, persona development, landing page experiments, funnel optimizations, A/B tests, Google Analytics, Mixpanel, KISS Metrics, Adwords, Facebook, etc etc.
Academic Research
A quick search on Google Scholar or SSRN will reveal that I’m not actively publishing right now. I’m busy working with startups and I love what I’m doing too much to slow down to the pace of the lonely academic research cycle.
My scholarly interests lie at the intersection of creativity, decision-making and culture with an emphasis on the ways in which the social environment shapes our strategies for generating and evaluating new ideas. I see creativity as a strategic process through which we not only solve problems and design innovations, but through which we also seek to gain acceptance, status, and power.
Keywords: Creativity, design, and innovation; problem definition, idea generation and idea selection; new product development teams; decision-making; cognitive style; organisational culture; group norms; conflict and diversity; innovation in service industries, design thinking.
Dissertation
The Blank Page: Effects of Constraint on Creativity. PhD thesis, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. (Contact me for a copy.)
Recent Publications
(see my CV for complete list)
Getting down to business: Using speedstorming to initiate creative cross-disciplinary collaboration
Creativity and Innovation Management, Vol. 19, No. 1, 57-67
Joyce, C. K., Jennings, K. E., Hey, J. H. G., Kalil, T., & Grossman, J. C. (2010)
Putting the discipline in interdisciplinary: Using speedstorming to teach and initiate creative collaboration in nanoscience
Journal of Nanoeducation, Vol. 1, No. 1, 75–85.
Hey, J., Joyce, C., Jennings, K. E., Kalil, T., and Grossman, J. C. (2009).
Innovation in services: Corporate culture and investment banking
California Management Review, Vol. 50, No. 1, 174-191
Joyce, C. K., Chatman, J. A., & Lyons, R. (2007).
Framing innovation: Negotiating shared frames during early design phases
Journal of Design Research, Vol. 6. No. 1, 79-99
Hey, J. H. G., Joyce, C. K., Beckman, S. L. (2007)