The Role of Epistemic Emotions and Activities in Creative Action: A Metacognitive and Self‐Regulatory Approach

Epistemic activities and emotions play an important role when generating, evaluating, and selecting creative ideas. This is especially so when examining creative actions developmentally. A total of 134 business students participated in an innovation tournament in which they were asked to explore product or service categories, generate, evaluate, and select their most creative idea, prepare a business plan of the idea selected, and present their ideas to peers who acted as participants and judges in 16 weeks. While preparing, participants were asked to complete a set of written assignments and questions to assess depth of knowledge of the category chosen, satisfaction, frustration, and self‐evaluations. All ideas were formalized as business plans and evaluated by peers during the innovation tournament. Results showed a positive relationship between depth of knowledge and satisfaction during the idea selection stage. Satisfaction and frustration were positively and negatively related, respectively, to evaluations of the creativity of the ideas. Last, depth of knowledge was the only significant predictor of peer evaluations of the creativity of the idea presented in their business plans. Qualitative findings during reflection showed important challenges for developing something truly original and effective. The implications of the results for creative action from a creative self‐regulatory and metacognitive perspective were discussed.