Is Google driving us dumb? The introspective looping.

Creativity is a key source of strategic advantage in nowadays knowledge-based society. However, reactive paradigms still dominate innovation theory: solutions follow well-known problems. But triggering radical innovation requires proactive creativity, implying using information to constantly find new problems to solve. Led by <italic>Google</italic>, personalization strategies use algorithms to obtain filtered information, meeting particular users’ expected preferences. This phenomenon, largely neglected by management research and practice, has received substantial criticism, around the concerns that it impoverishes social discourse, slows down human brain thinking capability, and eventually reduces creativity and innovation potential. Indeed, research has confirmed the positive impact that exposure to numerous and divergent external stimuli has on individual creativity. Thought-provoking questions emerge: Will customized search outputs affect companies’ competitive capabilities? If personalized search results reduce the diversity and overall wealth of stimuli received, will creativity and innovation in organizations be diminished? How can managers prevent this potentially dangerous process? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]