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Focus areas

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The long-term research objective of the focus area is a general interdisciplinary theory of creative and socially innovative processes. Understanding the dynamics of creativity and innovation is relevant for many different scientific disciplines and is gaining in importance, especially at a time of numerous profound changes and crises that are challenging the familiar world order. Scientists from nine faculties investigate creative processes at different levels (individual - group - society), including their interactions, across their various research areas. We include the following aspects, among others:

  • The creative behaviour of the individual
  • The cognitive prerequisites of creative action
  • The interactive creativity and contextual prerequisites of creative action
  • The reception processes of creative action
  • Innovative social dynamics

These areas should not only be related to each other in contrastive analyses, but their interactions and causal, procedural and structural overlaps should also be worked out in collaborative research. Only through the interdisciplinary expansion and sharpening of existing concepts of creativity can a decentralised, network-like profile of creative processes emerge that does justice to the complexity and breadth of the subject area.

To investigate creative and innovative processes at different levels, two working groups of PINC focus interdisciplinary on different aspects of the phenomenon and set different research priorities:

  • WG1 “Creativity/Innovation, Convention and Standardization”
  • WG2 “Creativity/Innovation in Communication, Interaction, and Cognition”

WG1 focuses on the social dimension of creative and innovative processes and examines the significance of supra-individual framework conditions. WG2, on the other hand, focuses on the individual with its physical, cognitive, and social disposition. Both working groups share a common research topic: How can processes of creativity and innovation not only be restricted but also initiated? From an overarching perspective, both groups investigate the relationship between creativity and transformation.

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