Innovation and creativity in creative industries

Abstract Creativity is the intentional combination of symbols, ideas, or objects in a way that is unexpected for a given audience. While creativity is a process, innovation is the outcome of this process. Moving from the macro‐level to the micro‐level, I survey the literature on innovation and creativity in creative industries, spanning cultural, economic, and organizational sociology as well as management studies. As a broader market force, uncertainty over innovativeness results in powerful status orders with each creative industry. Within these markets, creative producers work to situate their products as innovative within certain categories and breadths of categories. Creative producers' social network configurations and their face‐to‐face interactions within these networks shape both the process of creative collaboration and the resulting innovations. Producers' moment‐to‐moment valuations, modes of cognition, and interactions with material properties of creative products also influence the creative process. I argue that future research should give more attention to how decisions in the creative process evolve over time and are relationally shaped.