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Focus areas

PINC: Processes of innovation and creativity

Creativity is the central human ability to adapt to new conditions, to find solutions to problems beyond established routines, often in interaction, but also to establish new routines or adapt established routines, to gain new insights and to shape the common living environment. This ability becomes particularly important in times of crisis and other special challenges where established routines are not enough.

Our common goal is to achieve a deeper general understanding of social or cultural processes of renewal in the broadest sense. To this end, we will analyse, model and compare processes of individual, interactive and collective creative action as well as dynamics of innovation at the societal level in different domains.

Upcoming Events

07.–09.10.2026
Conference – Work in the Literature of Poetic Realism

December 1, 2026 | 18.00–20.00
Guest talk – Gretel Goh (National University of Singapore): Descriptions of Emotions in Dramatic Literature

February 5, 2027 | 10.00–16.00
Workshop – "Lyrische Kreativität. Formen und Funktionen des lyrischen Textes in Mittelalter und Gegenwart", together with Dr. Alexander Rudolph/Tristan Marquardt (LMU Munich)

09.–12.02.2027
ZiF-Workshop Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Innovation and Creativity

Announcements

Conference: Work in the Literature of Poetic Realism

With Gustav Freytag’s commercial novel Soll und Haben, the theme of paid labor appears prominently early on in the literature of Poetic Realism. The new emphasis on the relationship between idealism and realism, which characterizes Poetic Realism in contrast to the literature of the “Goethe era”, leads to a literary turn toward the everyday world. This also includes the theme of ‘work’ – understood initially as paid labor, but always incorporating historically marginalized forms of work, especially care work. The conference explores how ‘work’ is addressed in texts of Poetic Realism.

Further information can be found here.