Creativity Drivers: Design Principles for Virtual Creative Collaboration

Creativity is an important driver of innovation and corporate success. Due to the digital transformation, creative collaboration increasingly occurs in virtual teams. This raises the research question how to design digital work environments to foster creative virtual collaboration. Therefore, this paper aims to develop design knowledge in the form of design principles for creativity drivers in virtual collaboration based on the Design Science Research (DSR) approach. Based on the descriptive knowledge from a conceptual literature review and the prescriptive knowledge from five expert interviews with creative professionals, we derived a total of 14 design principles that address creativity drivers in five areas: functionality, process, mood, meaning, and collaboration. Our key finding is that a creative virtual environment must be highly adaptive. The design and functionality of ICT must adapt to changing demands in the creative process and respond to individual differences and experiences