Looking at creativity and entrepreneurship common ground: an organizational approach

This work, following the conceptual recombination theory, by which ideas and concepts are mentally merged to transform and extend knowledge, explores and summarizes the current sources of academic literature, simultaneously engaging research in the fields of entrepreneurship and creativity. A bibliometric co-citation analysis was applied to identify the “invisible colleges” and the latent relationships among the most significant papers. Multivariate analyses including cluster, multidimensional scaling, and pathfinder were combined to map the “nodes” positioning the literature. The goal of this study is (1) to increase the awareness of scholars by detecting and visualizing the intellectual structure of the shared ground among both sets of literature; (2) to identify the connected schools of thought, methods, constructs, and organizational theories to problematize or literature gaps to be filled; (3) to reveal the network structure—the central, bridge, and peripheral nodes—and to hypothesize trailblazing trends, sidings, or forgotten contributions; and (4) to generate, thanks to a creativity “grant,” new insights to enable entrepreneurs to wittingly exercise their power. Following a bibliometric approach, 73 major co-cited items were selected. Given the transverse nature of the creativity domain and of the search for academic interdisciplinary comminglings, data were collected from Science (SCI), Social Sciences (SSCI) and Arts and Humanities (A&HCI) citation indices for the 1991-2015period.