Author:

Justin Berg – Stanford University

Interviewers:

Shannon Sciarappa – Boston College

Meng Han – Singapore Management University

Article link: https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392221083650

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• The idea to study creative portfolios as “carriers of history” in order to determine the trajectory of one-hit wonders versus hit makers is fascinating. How did you come up with the idea to study creators in the U.S. music industry? How did the idea develop? 

The seeds for this paper were first planted as I wrote an earlier paper in ASQ (Berg, 2016). One of the takeaways from the 2016 paper is that creators’ accuracy in evaluating their own ideas is likely to decrease over time, highlighting the difficulty of sustaining success in creative work. As I finished the 2016 paper, I began reflecting on where to take my research next, and I became increasingly interested in what drives short-lived vs. sustained success in creative careers. I realized the music industry would be an ideal context to study this question because it’s a notoriously fast-paced, high-churn creative industry. I liken it to a biologist studying fruit flies so they can examine many lifecycles—music allowed me to study many lifecycles of artists’ careers.

• How knowledgeable were you about the music industry before the start of this study?  Are you a musician yourself?

I’m not a musician, and I’d say I’m an average music fan. But because music is so popular and beloved, being an average music fan still means I listen to a lot of music and that music is an important part of my life. As I mention in the paper, the average person in the U.S. listens to 24 hours of music per week. So, I had some familiarity with the music industry simply from being an average fan, but I chose the music industry because it was an ideal context for the research question, not because of my prior knowledge of the industry. I approached this project as a scholar of creativity and innovation, not as a music industry expert. I think the fact that I entered the project without preconceived notions about how the music industry works was probably helpful overall. I’m also sure my naivete had some downsides—perhaps more prior expertise would have made things easier or more efficient. I did, however, speak with several industry insiders throughout the project to make sure I wasn’t missing anything important. And now that the paper has been published and covered in the media, it’s been fun to hear from many music executives, artists, and producers about how the findings resonate with their experiences.

• We’re interested in the idea that the past affects the future.  Can you describe how your path-dependent view of creativity and market success emerged? 

Ever since I was a child, my favorite movie has been Back to the Future. In the film, Marty McFly (played by Michael J. Fox) travels back in time and meets his own parents when they were in high school. By sparking seemingly small changes in his parents’ past, Marty alters their life trajectories, revolutionizing his family’s future. This has remained my favorite movie since childhood for a reason: I’m fascinated by the idea that events from our past can have an outsize impact on our future. My path-dependent theory of creativity and market success grew from this longtime fascination. I don’t think everything in life is path dependent, but I do think many things are. When I started to think about what drives sustained success in creators’ careers, my mind (unsurprisingly) focused on how the beginning of creators’ careers may be important for shaping the end—and my intuition was that early creativity may set creators up for sustained success. I began to flesh out this intuition, and after lots of hard work and many iterations, I arrived at the theory proposed in the paper.

• How did this paper develop over time from the first draft to the published version? 
  • What were some of the challenges in the review process, and how did you tackle them? 
  • What can the readers of this blog learn from your experience of the review process? 

I was fortunate to have an excellent Associate Editor (Caroline Bartel) and three very helpful and constructive reviewers. Thanks to their feedback, I think the paper improved in many ways throughout the review process—let me describe one of the most significant improvements and a potential lesson that can be learned from it. Upon first submission, the paper focused on artists with one or more hits; the study did not yet include artists with zero hits. In the first round of feedback, the review team pointed out that readers may be left wondering how the two dimensions of creativity in the model—novelty and variety—predict the likelihood of ever achieving an initial hit (vs. having zero hits in one’s career). The feedback from the review team essentially laid out two possible ways to deal with this question, and the review team seemed open to either approach. The first approach would be to “double down” on artists with one or more hits and make it clear to the reader why this focus makes sense, which would not require any additional data. The second approach would be to add artists with zero hits in their careers to the study, which would require lots of hard work to collect additional data (on top of the massive effort already put into the existing dataset).

After carefully thinking it over, I went with the second approach, and I’m very glad I took this path of more resistance. I realized that the reviewers were raising a thoughtful question that other readers were likely to have, making the extra work a worthwhile investment. It was a huge effort to collect the additional data on artists with zero hits in their careers; the dataset expanded from 4,857 artists and about 350,000 songs to 69,050 artists and over 3 million songs. The expanded dataset enabled tests showing that novelty negatively predicts—and variety positively predicts—the likelihood of achieving an initial hit (Hypotheses 6 and 7 in the paper). I think the extra effort to collect the additional data was well worth it, as it allowed the paper to tell a more comprehensive and satisfying story.

Given the considerable work required to get a paper through the review process, it can be tempting to take any “out” that a review team offers you—and doing so is probably wise most of the time. But I do think in some cases, it’s better to choose the harder path, even if it doesn’t seem to be required by the feedback.

• You have collected and analyzed an immense amount of data spanning five decades. Do you have any tips for researchers working with such a large amount of data?

Be patient and view data collection as a long-term investment. Quite fittingly, I think large-scale data collections are often path dependent. Decisions you make early on shape the quality of your final dataset. Don’t rush it. Take your time to make sure you’re making decisions that will set you up for later success. And remember you can’t foresee all the challenges in advance, so you should be prepared to iterate and redo each step many times as you figure out the best way forward.

I’d also encourage you to think carefully about your teammates. Most large-scale data collections take much longer and are much harder than anticipated. You want collaborators you enjoy and who will stick it out with you until the end. I was lucky to have an extremely talented and diligent Research Assistant, Louis Duperier, as my collaborator in building the music dataset. In addition to possessing excellent technical skills, he was a team player who tackled every new challenge with alacrity, which was critical for completing our lengthy and difficult data-collection effort.

• You suggested a “portfolio perspective” in examining creativity/innovation in organizations. In which contexts do you anticipate portfolio perspectives to be the most helpful?  Are there perhaps boundary conditions (e.g., in the type of product, organization, or industry) to the applicability of this strategy?

I think a portfolio perspective is particularly useful in domains where creative output can be distinctly quantified and cataloged, such as music, literature, film, fashion, art, architecture, and product invention. Portfolios may be less relevant in contexts where the product lifecycle is lengthy, such as aerospace or telecommunications, due to the scale of investment and time required to bring an innovation to market. Although my paper focused on portfolios of finished products that have been released to the market, a portfolio perspective could also be useful for analyzing the unfinished ideas that individuals, groups, or organizations have on their plate at a given time.

• Since your focus was explicitly on creators, rather than specific organizations, how did you successfully integrate this creative context to appeal to the management and organizations audience? 

I made sure to explain in the paper that creators are not the only ones who have to worry about the implications of their portfolios—managers and organizations in creative industries also need to consider how creators’ portfolios may shape their success in the short and long run. Working with a creator means working within the parameters of their portfolio, for better or worse.

• In addition to quite a few solo-authored pieces such as this, you have published a number of studies with incredible teams of collaborators.  How would you compare or contrast these experiences?

I like having a mix of solo and co-authored projects. I enjoy the autonomy of solo-authored work and the camaraderie of co-authored work. When I spend a lot of time working solo, I’m reinvigorated when I switch to working with co-authors. And when I have a long stretch of co-authoring, I appreciate the opportunity that solo projects afford to work and think at my own pace. I realize that solo authoring is not for everyone, but I find it to be a nice complement to co-authoring.

Interviewer bios:

Shannon L. Sciarappa (shannon.sciarappa@bc.edu) is a doctoral candidate in the Management and Organization Department of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. She studies identity and meaningful work and takes a qualitative approach to studying these phenomena. 

Han Meng (meng.han.2021@pbs.smu.edu.sg) is a doctoral candidate in the Organisational Behaviour and Human Resources Department of Singapore Management University. Her current research focuses on cultural tightness, creativity, and workplace promotion.