2026 Theses Doctoral

From Spark to Spotlight: Understanding the Lifecycle of Creative Ideas

Horton, Carl B.

This dissertation develops a lifecycle perspective on creativity, examining how ideas are shaped, selected, and supported across stages of generation, evaluation, and presentation. Although existing research has produced rich insight into these phases, they are often studied separately. Bringing them into conversation, I show that creative success depends not only on the quality of ideas, but also on the conditions under which they are surfaced, judged, and made legible to others. These conditions matter especially when an idea’s value is difficult to verify directly, as surrounding processes shape which ideas gain traction and which are filtered out prematurely. I refer to this broader pattern as creative gravity: the cumulative pressure exerted on ideas under conditions of uncertainty and selection.

Using experiments, field evidence, computational text analysis, and theoretical integration, I examine creative gravity across three stages of the idea lifecycle. First, I study idea generation in human–AI collaboration and show that prompts emphasizing unexpectedness reduce semantic convergence and improve downstream creativity. Second, I study venture evaluation and show how visible peer ratings increase convergence and selectively amplify perceptions of creativity. Third, I study presentation in entrepreneurial contexts and show that repeated venture or product names increase support through greater legibility, recognition, and related inferences. Building on these empirical chapters, I develop a broader lifecycle theory of creative gravity to help explain how even promising ideas can lose momentum before their potential can be fully recognized.