Creative Jolts: Exploring How Entrepreneurs Let Go of Ideas During Creative Revision

Creative revision involves sharing nascent ideas and soliciting feedback. This process has been portrayed as providing instrumental feedback that enables autonomous creators to shape and progress their ideas in a mostly positive, developmental way. However, creative revision also entails destruction—letting go of some ideas to make way for the new. Research suggests that abandoning some aspects of ideas will be affectively challenging for creators, but has yet to elaborate how they navigate that challenge. In a longitudinal qualitative study of entrepreneurial ventures over a one-year period, we uncovered a novel phenomenon: the creative jolt—an episode of cognitive and emotional upheaval through which creators let go of their original ideas and allowed new ones to emerge, so that their ideas shifted in dramatic ways. We elaborate the processes through which creative jolts shape the trajectories of creative ideas. Our study captures the rollercoaster of heightened affect and cognitive disorientation experienced by autonomous creators as they try to bring nascent ideas to life.