Khanna, TarunSchirmann, Kyle2026-07-0720262026-05-062026Schirmann, Kyle. 2026. Creativity, Information, and Strategy. Doctoral Dissertation, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.32449018https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/42743996Organizations create strategic value and derive sustainable competitive advantage by accumulating, processing, developing, synthesizing, and transforming knowledge. Yet the link from resources to outcomes is often opaque, given that the building blocks, cognitive and organizational processes, and outcomes of creative or knowledge-based work are often intractable or difficult to quantify. This dissertation is composed of three essays, each distinct in phenomenon, method, and data, which shed light on this thread. The first draws from a field experiment to demonstrate how working conditions shape the flow and value of information within an organization. Hybrid workers, or those who work both from home and from the office, distributed more valuable information within the organization and emerged as knowledge brokers. The second looks at the global recorded music industry: Global South musicians who aspire to international success must conform to aesthetic norms to break into new markets, but this tactic also undermines their long-term survival. The final essay, more theoretical and speculative in nature, examines the role of noise and representation in organizational creativity. Interactions between ideas, artifacts, and people in a multi-agent setting yield emergent, creative products and contribute to the organization's knowledge base, and noisy translations between intangible ideas and tangible representations are potentially generative. Limited insight into this process generates causal ambiguity and can constitute a strategic capability. These essays also contribute new techniques for quantifying intangibles. In the first case, a novel metric demonstrates the unique value of information a worker distributes to others, relative to the information shared by other workers; in the second case, the fundamental aesthetic content of music produces a new metric of product differentiation; in the final case, a simulation illustrates the loci of organizational creativity.application/pdfenCreativityInformationInnovationKnowledge flowsOrganizationsStrategyManagementBusiness administrationInformation scienceThesis or Dissertation2026-07-070000-0003-2276-4186