  Creativity is viewed as one of the most important skills in the context of
future-of-work. In this paper, we explore how the dynamic (self-organizing)
nature of social networks impacts the fostering of creative ideas. We run 6
trials (N=288) of a web-based experiment involving divergent ideation tasks. We
find that network connections gradually adapt to individual creative
performances, as the participants predominantly seek to follow high-performing
peers for creative inspirations. We unearth both opportunities and bottlenecks
afforded by such self-organization. While exposure to high-performing peers is
associated with better creative performances of the followers, we see a
counter-effect that choosing to follow the same peers introduces semantic
similarities in the followers' ideas. We formulate an agent-based simulation
model to capture these intuitions in a tractable manner, and experiment with
corner cases of various simulation parameters to assess the generality of the
findings. Our findings may help design large-scale interventions to improve the
creative aptitude of people interacting in a social network.
