Encounters and Extended Collaborative Creativity: Mobilization of Cultural Resources in the Development of a Functional Food Product

The chapter suggests that, in order to make sense of product development work, a sociocultural approach to creativity needs to be complemented by the concept of object-oriented and mediated activity as well as by concepts developed in innovation studies and the history of technology. We introduce the idea of a creative encounter in which agents from different organizations meet and recognize the complementarity of their interests, expertise, and resources. It leads to the emergence of collaborative agency and to a joint project. We analyze the encounters and collaboration in the development of a functional food product called Benecol. The development process was a highly distributed collaborative enterprise to which different stakeholders contributed in various ways and with complementary cultural resources in different phases of the development work.