Abstract
Finding creative solutions to large-scale and complex problems, such as societal challenges, is often hard. Crowdsourcing has emerged as a valuable tool for such challenges, using diverse perspectives from general society to enhance creative problem-solving. The componential theory of creativity highlights creativity-related processes and domain knowledge as key components of creative output. Drawing from this theory, we examine how creativity support architectures and levels of task-knowledge intensity influence crowd creativity in crowdsourcing contexts. Through an online experiment, we compared two support architectures, remixing and external stimuli: crowd members were presented with ideas previously generated by other participants to foster a collective creative process. Our findings suggest that remixing prompts higher levels of crowd creativity than external stimuli. Further, the crowd exhibits greater creativity when working on low knowledge-intensity tasks, compared with high knowledge-intensity tasks, whereas the influence of support architectures on crowd creativity remains significant across knowledge-intensity levels. This study contributes to the crowdsourcing literature by applying the componential theory of creativity to understand how creativity support architectures interact with task-knowledge intensity to affect crowd creative output. In addition, practical implications for harnessing collective intelligence to address societal challenges and other large-scale, complex problems are discussed.