Call for Position Papers, Provocations, Vision Statements, and Creative Foresights
Creative Leadership Forum 2027 | Where are the Boundaries and Thresholds Today?
Familiar models of creativity and leadership no longer match the pace, context, and complexity of organizational life, and the Creative Leadership Forum invites short position and provocation papers that treat creative leadership as a live category of analysis and practice rather than a settled one to be applied to new conditions. The Forum acknowledges that the term grew out of earlier work on charismatic individuals and innovation frameworks, then spread across industries, disciplines, and institutional logics until its meaning grew contested even as its currency grew alongside it. Generative AI has sharpened that pressure, and so has the wider, disparate conditions of digital, data-driven, platform-based organizational life, as those now increasingly shape what creativity and leadership are taken to mean and who gets credit for either. Such tensions should be treated as opportunities to explore rather than problems to resolve before the Forum’s explorations begin.
What We Are Looking For
We encourage multiple kinds of submissions. A paper might argue for a sharper definition of creative leadership, or expose where an existing one collapses as platformization and algorithmic logic reshape which creative processes or workflows hold sway or who gets recognized for creative work. Others might sketch what the field of research and analysis could become over the next decade, or build out a plausible organizational or system future and work through what creative leadership would need to look like inside it. Historical or genealogical accounts, tracing the term’s evolution and usage and asking whether its previous formulations have outlived their usefulness, is equally welcome. Practical accounts and case studies are especially encouraged as bases for probing current and future creative leadership practice. Besides paper versions, we will also accept short video and audio submissions (lasting no longer than three minutes)
We are particularly interested in contributions connected to the Forum’s three current areas of exploration:
Rethinking Creative Leadership and Leaders: How should Creative Leadership evolve as organizations, institutions, technologies, societies and individuals change?
Leaders and Leadership Across Cultures: What can different cultural perspectives teach us about creativity, leadership, collaboration, and problem-solving?
Creative Leadership Methods and Tools: Which methods, capabilities, practices, and technologies help leaders translate creative thinking into meaningful action?
These areas provide orientation, not boundaries. Contributions that challenge the current framing or introduce questions we have not yet considered are equally welcome.
Forms of Contribution
Contributions may take different forms, including:
Essays and opinion pieces
Research insights and emerging findings
Reflections from leadership and organizational practice
Cases and practical experiences
Provocations and critical perspectives
Methods, frameworks, and promising practices
Questions that deserve wider discussion
Submissions grounded in non-Western traditions of thought and practice are especially welcome, given how little existing scholarship on creativity and cultural industries outside the West has been put into direct conversation with creativity and leadership theory.
To be clear, the aim is not to create another collection of generic leadership content.
We are looking for contributions that add meaningful perspectives to a continuing, substantive conversation around creativity and leadership.
Research Touchstones and Perspectives
A few research touchstones may help, though they are not required to reference, and most sit within a Western management tradition.
Mainemelis, Kark, and Epitropaki offer a tripartite model of creative leadership as facilitation, vision-direction, or integration (Academy of Management Annals, 2015).
Bilton and Cummings approach strategy itself as a creative process (Creative Strategy, Wiley, 2010).
Slocum’s “Creative Leadership Today” argues that current practice demands a third loop of learning beyond Argyris and Schön’s double loop (2025).
Kerr and Frasca’s Emergent Futures Lab treats creativity as an emergent, ecological process through its world-building work.
O’Connor and Gu’s account of China’s cultural economy breaks from that Western frame and pushes back directly against the universal claims Western creative-industries discourse tends to make about itself (Red Creative, Intellect, 2020).
Submission and Selection Process
Selected submissions will shape the design of the three domains at the 2027 Creative Leadership Forum, which will examine the field’s foundations, its expression across national cultures including Switzerland, the UAE, South Korea, the United States, and China, as well as professional and industry cultures, and its translation into concrete leadership methods.
Outlines should run approximately 300 words and can take the form of an argument, a manifesto, a mini-case study, or a structured scenario. Submissions should be made by November 15, with a short author note.
Selected contributors will be invited to develop their outlines further for the Forum Blog and the three-day event in 2027.
Who Can Contribute
The Forum is committed to bringing together perspectives from researchers and practitioners alike.
We welcome contributions from scholars, professors, executives, entrepreneurs, practitioners, educators, public sector leaders, people working in culture and creative industries, and others whose experience or work can contribute to the exploration.
What matters is not a particular title or professional background.
What matters is the perspective you can bring.
Interested in Contributing?
If you have an idea, perspective, question, piece of research, practical experience, or emerging approach that could contribute to the Creative Leadership Forum, we would like to hear from you.
You do not need to arrive with a finished article.
Start with the idea you believe deserves to be part of the conversation.
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