Collaborative creativity as a field within computational social science

Generating new ideas and solutions is increasingly a collective phenomenon, where collaborative networks play a decisive role in finding and diffusing novel ideas. We can take advantage of computational social science (CSS) methods to understand creativity and innovation in fundamentally new ways. I argue that these developments open the possibility of reconciling the previously segregated focal areas of creativity and innovation into a unified area of collaborative creativity. In this novel area, we can treat the local community that sparks a novel idea and the broader field that diffuses and recombines ideas in a unified fashion, and we can also understand the macroscopic historical emergence of new fields and creative arenas. I outline how CSS transforms the study of creativity and innovation, how new methods can give us access to measuring novelty and network structure at scale, and what lessons and challenges remain to motivate further work.