The Novelty Journey in Evaluation Processes: The Role of Personal Traits, Social Factors and Idea Framing in Shaping Audience Preferences

This Ph.D. thesis includes a collection of four research papers focused on the journey of novelty in evaluative processes: various experiments are employed to look at how individual traits, social factors and framing of ideas shape novelty’s recognition. This project aims to increase the understanding of the underlying mechanisms in audience’s evaluation processes of novelty – an area of scholarly inquiry that has received less attention with respect to the generation of novelty (Hennessey & Amabile, 2010; Anderson, Potočnik & Zhou, 2014; Berg 2016; Boudreau, Guinan, Lakhani, & Riedl, 2016; Cattani, Ferriani & Lanza, 2017; Mueller, Melwani, Loewenstein & Deal, 2017; Zhou, Wang, Song, & Wu, 2017) – by providing theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature on creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship and, more generally, on social evaluation. To explore the mechanisms that shape audience’s evaluative outcome of novelty, different theoretical perspectives are adopted: specifically, the first two papers are experimental studies developed building on social-psychological literature; the third experimental paper takes a sociological lens; whereas, the fourth paper which consists of a literature review draws upon a broader range of scholarship on novelty evaluation - i.e. organizational theory, entrepreneurship, innovation, sociology and psychology.