Tension and Invention: Networks for Collective Creativity

How friction, diversity, and tension drive breakthrough ideas in business, technology, and culture

In the popular imagination, innovation is associated with the lone genius. Innovation, however, is never the product of one individual, but rather occurs through the combined efforts of a network of people. But how do these networks operate? In Tension and Invention, Balazs Vedres and David Stark argue that generative tension is the critical, yet often unacknowledged, mechanism that drives innovation.

The authors deconstruct conventional accounts of organizational behavior that equate efficiency with efficacy in creative endeavors. Using a diverse variety of empirical case studies including jazz combos, business groups, and video game developers, Vedres and Stark show how friction, far from being a liability, actively precipitates invention in contexts of radical uncertainty. The result is a theory of innovation on how disjuncture and dissonance, when structurally organized, can be harnessed for discovery.

Offering a compelling theoretical and empirical basis for rethinking the foundations of creative production, Tension and Invention delivers a powerful message: creativity is not born from smoothness or consensus, but from the productive struggles of difference. Invention happens because of tension, not despite it.

Balazs Vedres is Professor in the Department of Networks and Data Science and Professor and Head of Department in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Central European University.

David Stark is Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center on Organizational Innovation at Columbia University. He is the author of The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life, and editor of The Performance Complex: Valuations and Competitions in Social Life and Practicing Sociology: Tacit Knowledge for the Social Scientific Craft.