Wim Biemans and Eelko Huizingh win Creativity and Innovation Management Best Paper Award 2024

Associate professors Wim Biemans and Eelko Huizingh have won the Best Paper Award 2024 from the journal Creativity and Innovation Management. They received the award for their paper titled ‘Why so serious? The effects of humour on creativity and innovation’.

Wim Biemans and Eelko Huizingh are both associate professors at the Department of Innovation Management and Strategy of the Faculty of Economics and Business. In their paper, they provide new insights into the emerging literature about the impact of humour on creativity in innovation by conceptualizing humour as a situation-specific state. They use a mixed methods research design to investigate the use and impact of humour in two specific innovation contexts: idea generation by customers and collaboration in innovation teams.

Four contributions

Biemans and Huizingh’s research makes four important contributions. First, they suggest and demonstrate the relevance of a situation-specific humorous mood. Next, they distinguish between natural and instrumental humour and emphasize that a purposely induced humorous mood can enhance creativity. Third, they show that the impact of humour is not limited to a firm's individual employees but can also include external actors, such as customers, and interactions between members of innovation teams. Finally, the authors identify key drivers and effects of humorous mood in innovation. They integrate their findings from two empirical studies into a framework that captures the key concepts and relationships and use this framework to derive several directions for further research to better understand the effects of humour on creativity in the context of innovation.

About Biemans and Huizingh

Biemans has some 40 years of experience researching, teaching and consulting about innovation management and B2B marketing. His research covers a broad range of topics, such as service innovation, customer involvement in innovation, ethics in innovation, marketing-sales interface, the effect of humour on innovation, the implementation of marketing strategy, and implementing marketing agility. Huizingh also has extensive experience in teaching, research, management and coaching. His research focuses on the intersection of innovation & entrepreneurship, marketing and information technology. He has a broad research interest and is currently involved in numerous studies, including projects on portfolio management, social entrepreneurship, circular economy transition, open innovation effectiveness, and wicked problem solving.

Questions? Please contact Wim Biemans