Generativity

Zittrain (2006)

generative technology

a technology's overall capacity to produce unprompted change driven by large, varied and uncoordinated audiences (Zittrain, 2006, p. 1980)

A "technology's capacity for leverage across a range of tasks, adaptability to a range of different tasks, easy of mastery and accessibility" (Bygstad, 2017, p. 183)

Zittrain (2008) identifies five principal factors influencing how generative a system is 1. leverage 2. adaptation 3. ease of mastery 4. accessibility 5. transferability

Bygstad (2017)

uses generativity as a theoretical lens

Definition

In our context we take generativity to mean the outcome of the interaction between knowledgeable people and flexible information technologies (p. 183)

Origins and other uses

Bygstad traces the term back to Leibniz and common uses in modern sciences - evolutionary biology, cybernetics and linguisitcs "to express the basic idea that the observed complexity of a phenomenon...can be traced back to some basic elemetns and their mechanisms for interaction (Phelan, 2003)" (Bygstad, 2017, p. 183)

References Zittrain's definition and then argues that generativity "is a socio-technical concept, which includes the user and developer communities involved" (p. 183)

Lane (2011) argues that "**the capacity to innovate is determined by its _generative relationships" (Bygstad, 2017, p. 183). Avital and Te'eni (2009) found that innovation is dependent "on an appropriate combination of generative technology and a generative collective of users and developers" (Bygstad, 2017, p. 183)

References

Bygstad, B. (2017). Generative Innovation: A Comparison of Lightweight and Heavyweight IT: Journal of Information Technology. https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2016.15