Engaged scholarship involves harnessing the competencies of academics and practitioners to coproduce knowledge about complex phenomena by pursuing collaborative inquiry. It requires knowledge translation between them and identifying how each group understands key concepts such as creativity. Literature on creativity stipulates that it involves novelty and usefulness yet there is still diversity in how these elements are understood and operationalized. Scholars have identified three forms of creativity: maximization, integration, and balance. The distal relationship between novelty and usefulness, the distance from the target domain, and the distance between the stages in the creative process determine creativity forms. Drawing on interviews with academics and marketing practitioners, we sought to identify how they understand creativity and how they can develop a shared understanding to pursue effective engaged scholarship. We identified that academics embrace the maximization form andpractitioners the integration form, indicating differences in their understanding. Yet we also discovered that both groups embrace the balance form. Using a paradox theory lens, we arguethat embracing balance leads to healthy tensions between novelty and usefulness, between abstract and concrete thinking, and close circles of iteration between idea generation and implementation due to the moderate levels of novelty and usefulness, and of contextual, and processual, distances. This can generate shared understanding and dialogical relationshipsbetween academics and practitioners to foster effective engaged scholarship.
Ford et al. (Sun,) studied this question.