Use of content analysis for studying the creativity construct in the context of technology-rich applications

The potential of information and communication technology and the requirements from the competitive environment for corporations partly pull and partly push for the development of more creative tools to support work and creative IT applications. The concept of 'creativity' however, is not simple at all: there are more than 100 definitions of the concept. Something common to most of them is the requirement for novelty and utility. We have developed a method for identifying creative information systems based on descriptions of technology-rich applications. We identified creative characteristics which might distinguish between more and less creative applications. For this purpose, we defined keywords and employed raters to assess the value of the keywords in context, as well as occurrences of such words. An equally important purpose of the study was to test the usefulness of a research technique that is seldom used in IS research: content analysis. This was a way to study qualitative data in a more quantitative manner, and also to speed up the analysis compared, e.g., to reading the descriptions from the beginning to the end. The results from the study showed that more than one characteristic was necessary to discriminate between creative and less creative applications. Use of content analysis was promising, and we learned a lot about the technique. Content analysis is most useful for studying the content of technology-rich applications, as we are heading for a significant growth in electronic commerce systems. We are now much better equipped for future studies on identifying creative applications.