Dances with Avatar: How Creators Can Reduce the Novelty of Their Work to Achieve More Creative Success

While creativity is an established driver of profit for firms and success for individuals, not all situations are ideal for maximizing creativity. In this work, we establish a framework of ways that creators can deliberately reduce novelty in their works to make them more successful. The first way, permanent novelty reduction (PNR), is where creators decrease novelty in key aspects of their final product to make it more amenable to consumers or gatekeepers. The second way, temporary novelty reduction (TNR), involves strategically decreasing novelty in the short term to overcome environmental or functional resistance to novelty, often leading to a more creative product in the long term. Together, these two categories of novelty reduction support a new theoretical perspective: novelty reduction can play a critical role in the creative process. We develop this perspective by examining James Cameron and his team’s creative decisions during the making of one of the most successful films of all time, Avatar.