Creativity is essential for transforming digital capabilities into meaningful and sustained value. Innovative thinking across design, user experience, business models, and organisational practices enables organisations to translate digital transformation into tangible impact. This track explores how creativity can be embedded, scaled, and institutionalised within digital innovation processes and how it contributes to organisational resilience in the face of technological disruption.

While creativity has long been recognised as a cornerstone of innovation, digital contexts require a rethinking of established processes. Research on digital innovation emphasises that technology part of a system in which creativity drives new forms of value creation (Nambisan, 2020). Design thinking, in particular, helps organisations identify and leverage the opportunities that digital technologies offer to enact transformative change (Maggistretti, 2021). Evidence shows that firms investing in workforce creativity achieve superior organisational performance, especially when creativity serves as a precursor to developing digital capabilities (de Vasconcellos et al., 2020). Creativity has thus become one of the most important drivers in today’s digital business environments (Smailhodžić, 2021; Korzynski , 2021).

At the organisational level, balancing creative exploration with operational efficiency remains a central challenge. Leadership, dynamic capabilities, and supportive organisational cultures are key enablers, allowing creativity to function as a strategic asset in digital transformation (Scuotto, 2023). Studies indicate that digital transformation initiatives often fail when creative experimentation is suppressed by rigid governance, or when creative projects lack clear pathways to implementation (Birkinshaw & Gibson, 2004; Lee et al., 2019). Understanding how organisations design governance structures, incentives, and leadership practices to sustain creativity remains a critical research frontier.

Digital transformation also expands the boundaries of creativity beyond organisational walls. Open innovation and user-driven innovation research highlights how creativity increasingly emerges from distributed networks of partners, customers, and platforms (Chesbrough, 2003; Rumanti, 2023). Digital ecosystems enable collaborative experimentation and rapid recombination of ideas, creating both opportunities and vulnerabilities. Resilience in this context depends on how organisations integrate external creative inputs while managing intellectual property, data, and ecosystem relationships (Nambisan et al., 2019).

We welcome empirical, conceptual, and design-based contributions that deepen understanding of how creativity drives digital innovation at the individual, team, organisational, and ecosystem levels. Case studies illustrating successful creative practices, frameworks elucidating the mechanisms linking creativity and resilience, and analyses connecting digital creativity with measurable innovation outcomes are particularly encouraged.

This track holds particular relevance for R&D Management scholars, as it addresses the intersection of creativity and digital innovation, an area central to contemporary research and practice in R&D. By examining how creative processes can be systematically embedded and scaled within digital transformation initiatives, the track offers valuable insights into the evolving roles of R&D teams, leadership, and organisational design. Scholars will find opportunities to explore new frameworks, empirical evidence, and case studies that illuminate how creativity underpins successful R&D strategies in increasingly dynamic, data-driven environments. Additionally, the focus on multidisciplinary collaboration and ecosystem engagement aligns closely with current debates in R&D Management, making this track a rich forum for advancing both theoretical and practical understanding in the field.