“Having a Creative Day: Understanding Entrepreneurs’ Daily Idea Generation through a Recovery Lens”, 2018 (; backlinks):
We introduce recovery as an important antecedent of entrepreneurs’ creativity.
Day-to-day (within-person) variation in entrepreneurs’ creativity exceeds between-person differences in creativity.
Sleep efficiency, measured with actigraphy during the night, enhances entrepreneurs’ creativity on the subsequent day.
Entrepreneurs who reflect on how to solve problems outside working hours generate more novel ideas.
Older entrepreneurs are less creative as they prefer to switch off mentally from work-related thoughts in their leisure time.
Prior research has shown that trait creativity is important for becoming an entrepreneur and successful in business. We explore a new perspective by investigating how recovery from work stress influences entrepreneurs’ daily idea generation, a key aspect of creativity.
Physiological and mental recovery enables the cognitive processes of creative problem-solving. Moreover, differences in mental recovery processes help to explain age-related changes in entrepreneurs’ creativity.
Multilevel analyses based on 415 daily data from 62 entrepreneurs support our predictions. Our study introduces a new “state” perspective to understanding entrepreneurs’ creativity, and highlights the critical role of recovery processes for idea generation.
[Keywords: recovery, creativity, age, diary study, entrepreneurs]