Aims and scope

The interdisciplinary interfaces of Information Systems (IS) are fast emerging as defining areas of research and development in IS. These developments are largely due to the transformation of Information Technology (IT) towards networked worlds and its effects on global communications and economies. While these developments are shaping the way information is used in all forms of human enterprise, they are also setting the tone and pace of information systems of the future. The major advances in IT such as client/server systems, the Internet and the desktop/multimedia computing revolution, for example, have led to numerous important vistas of research and development with considerable practical impact and academic significance. While the industry seeks to develop high performance IS/IT solutions to a variety of contemporary information support needs, academia looks to extend the reach of IS technology into new application domains. Information Systems Frontiers (ISF) aims to provide a common forum of dissemination of frontline industrial developments of substantial academic value and pioneering academic research of significant practical impact.  
  
Information Systems Frontiers will focus on research and development at the IS/IT interfaces in the academia and industry. The interfaces include the base disciplines of computer science, telecommunications, operations research, economics and cognitive sciences, for instance. Emerging areas that ISF will concentrate on in the next few years include, but are not limited to:

    enterprise modeling and integration
    emerging object/web technologies
    information economics
    IT integrated manufacturing
    medical informatics
    digital libraries
    mobile computing and electronic commerce.

The publication highlights of ISF are:

Focus

    Provide a forum for both academicians and industry specialists to explore the multiple frontiers of the IS/IT field
    Bring innovative research on all aspects of IS/IT interfaces from analytical, behavioral and technological perspectives 

Format

    Published bimonthly, with dedicated issues on a regular basis as well as a general issue per year
    Internet support with abstracts, fast track reviews, discussion groups and a variety of other services

Content

    Theories and models of IS/IT systems and solutions
    Pragmatic solutions to practical IS/IT problems
    Computational, empirical and system developmental studies
    Perspectives synthesizing recent developments in interface areas
    State-of-the-art, state-of-the-market, state-of-the-practice surveys
    Reviews of challenges, solutions and lessons learned in practice
    Management
    An Editorial Advisory Group and an Editorial Board both including outstanding individuals fro academia and industry
    Eminent guest editors for the dedicated issues,
    Editors of websites managing and maintaining the internet services. 

Officially cited as: Inf Syst Front 

Special Issue on The Changing Nature of Creativity in the Era of Generative Artifical Intelligence (GenAI)
Submission Date: 2025-04-30

Despite the rich and cross-disciplinary literature on creativity at the individual, team, and organizational level, the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and more recently, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) puts into question the relevance of existing knowledge in this area. Contrary to traditional AI, GenAI has the ability to produce novel content, including audio, images, text, and videos. Our proposed Special Issue (SI) seeks to build on an emerging interest with implications both within and beyond the Information Systems (IS) community, by exploring how these recent developments especially around GenAI influence creativity in organizations. Is GenAI a threat to human and organizational creativity? Does GenAI “compete” with humans, or could it complement human creativity and what is the role of organizations and managers in this era? These are only some of the questions we aim to shed light on with our SI in our effort to develop new understandings around creativity and GenAI.

Creativity is a topic of cross-disciplinary importance (e.g., psychology, engineering, arts, management), traditionally associated with the production of ideas that are both novel and useful (e.g., Amabile 1998). There exist different models to study creativity in different literatures; for example, in the field of marketing, the most popular models used is the 4Ps of creativity, which sees creativity as associated with the person, the product, the process, or the press of the environment (Richards 1999). In management and organizational studies, creativity has been studied at three levels: the individual (arguing that individuals can be creative due to personal characteristics and cognitive abilities); the team (presenting factors such as team composition and leadership that may influence creativity at the team level); and the organization (discussing the role of organizational culture and climate) (Amabile 1998; Andriopoulos 2001; Woodman et al. 1993). As technology evolved and influenced how individuals work in organizations, scholars developed an interest in how technology may influence the development of creativity. We thus saw a new stream of creativity research, this time in the context of virtual teams whose members are geographically (often globally) dispersed and communicate and collaborate using a range of different technologies. This literature has examined whether individuals can still be creative when they cannot work with their teams face-to-face and contributed an understanding of the varied role played by digital technologies and suitable management practices that could enable and support creativity in these contexts (Chamakiotis et al. 2013; Chamakiotis and Panteli 2023; Nemiro 2007; Ocker 2005).

Throughout the years, there has been consensus that creativity is what sets us (humans) apart from technological artifacts (computers). In other words, human creativity has been seen as something that cannot be replaced by computers. As a result, existing literature on creativity has sought to explore how digital technologies may influence human creativity and how leadership and management can be practiced so as to have a positive impact on human creativity (e.g., Chamakiotis and Panteli 2017). Nonetheless, we are now in an era of unprecedented technological developments, witnessing how GenAI may be better than humans in a number of ways, including creativity, through the generation of original content (Kshetri et al. 2023). As Marr (2023) puts it in a recent Forbes article, “[tools] like ChatGPT and Dall-E give the appearance of being able to carry out creative tasks — such as writing a poem or painting a picture — in a way that’s often indistinguishable from what we can do ourselves”. Further, although creativity has traditionally been seen and studied as something positive, the emergence of GenAI has revealed negative facets of creativity, with tech companies acknowledging algorithmic problems that may promote discrimination (Small 2023). For example, Google’s Gemini was seen to creatively produce images of a female pope as well as racially diverse Nazis (Field 2024); and to advise users to add glue onto their pizza and to eat rocks (McMahon and Kleinman 2024), thus distorting common cultural understandings and tangible historical facts, and putting users’ health in danger. Therefore, further to promoting ideas that might be “new and novel,” benefitting organizations and society, GenAI-enabled creativity is likely to have negative consequences, including enhancing discrimination, spreading misinformation, and endangering individuals.

Consequently, GenAI constitutes an emblematic illustration of how IS may in fact influence the world in truly unprecedented (positive or negative) ways. In this SI we are interested in how GenAI may influence creativity in particular. Despite a recognized interest in both topics (GenAI and creativity), in this SI we aim to bring the two concepts together and develop an understanding of the possibilities of GenAI-enabled creativity, the dangers, and the practices that may be required to manage GenAI-enabled creativity in the spirit of using IS and GenAI responsibly (Dennehy et al. 2023; Sivarajah et al. 2023; Trocin et al. 2023) and for the common good (Davison et al. 2023).

Though there is a recognition of the creative side of GenAI and specifically what is known as “analytical creativity” (Ming et al. 2024), there remains a need to explore the relationship between GenAI creativity and its effect on human, team and organizational creativity, as well as the creative potential of GenAI in a range of industries, sectors, and situations — e.g., in the creative industries (Piskopani et al. 2023), in education (Chen et al. 2023), in health (Sivarajah et al. 2023), and in emergency situations (Piccialli et al. 2021) — and its wider impacts in terms of scope and sustainability of these industries. With our SI, we hope to be able to provide fresh research that addresses some of these areas and which could be of value to academics, practitioners and policy makers.

Topics of submission include, but are not limited to:

• How GenAI systems influence human creativity.
•The reconfiguration of leadership practices in the era of GenAI.
•The role of leadership/management in enhancing human creativity in the era of GenAI.
•What GenAI creativity looks like and the opportunities it can provide.
•The kind of professions that may need to be adapted in the era of GenAI.
•Organizations’ role in ensuring human creativity.
•The effects of GenAI on team and/or organizational creativity.
•Facilitating/hindering factors in the use of GenAI for human creativity.
•The intersection between human and organizational creativity in the era of GenAI.
• The role of GenAI developers in promoting creativity.
•Ethical issues in developing GenAI for creativity in organizations.
•Impact of GenAI on creativity within IS education.
•How GenAI enables specific types of professionals (e.g., content creators, educators) to become more creative.
•How professionals across different sectors may be able to work alongside GenAI in order to promote creativity.
•The effect of GenAI on the creative industries, including how it values or devalues art.
•How can human creativity in particular be safeguarded and regulated to avoid unethical use and copyright infringement.

Submission Instructions

Manuscripts must be submitted in PDF format to the ISF-Springer online submission system at https://www.editorialmanager.com/isfi and the authors need to select "Special Issue: The Changing Nature of Creativity in the Era of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)" during the submission process. Paper submissions must conform to the format guidelines of Information Systems Frontiers https://www.springer.com/journal/10796/submission-guidelines. Submissions should be approximately 32 pages double spaced including references. Prospective authors are encouraged to submit a 1,000-word abstract for evaluation and feedback by email to the lead guest editor), although this is not a mandatory step. Unsuitable papers will be rejected within fifeteen days from submission. Authors are encouraged to submit before the paper submission deadline if their work is ready for submission. Authors of selected abstract submissions will be invited to a Paper Developmental Workshop (PDW) which will take place online in November 2024. The criteria for selection will be: (a) fit with the SI aims; (b) theoretical framing of the study (both conceptual and empirical papers are welcome); and (c) completion/maturity level of the proposed study (i.e., research-in-progress papers will not be considered). Authors not selected to attend the PDW may still submit their work if they consider it addresses the aims of the SI. Finally, selected authors may be asked to review other papers during the review process.

Important dates

•Abstract submission to PDW (optional by email to the lead guest editor): 30th September 2024
•PDW: November 2024
•Submission deadline: 30th April 2025
•Notification of first-round reviews: 31st July 2025
•Revised Manuscript due: 31st October 2025
•Notification of second-round reviews: 31st January 2026
•Final version due: 31st March 2026
•Expected final decision: 30th April 2026