Thomas Gillier
Thomas Gillier is an Associate Professor at Grenoble Ecole de Management. He holds a Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) from Mines Paris – PSL Research University. Thomas is a Fulbright Research Scholar (2021). Thomas has developed and taught courses on (1) creativity and innovation management and, (2) technology entrepreneurship for both undergraduate, specialized masters and executive teaching programs at GEM.
In his research, Thomas explores the process of creativity in collaborative and distributed contexts such as open innovation, crowdsourcing, open science and open foresight. Thomas specifically studies the generative and receptive side of creativity. Thomas examines how individuals and teams generate, evaluate, promote and elaborate new ideas in organizations. Inspired by recent research advances in cognitive/social psychology and design theories, Thomas seeks to reveal novel creative thinking processes that depart from the traditional divergence/convergence model of creativity. Among others, Thomas is interested in creative contexts where people develop visionary concepts and explore new knowledge. Thomas’ research works rely both on qualitative and quantitative research methods, he has conducted research projects with several high tech and innovative firms in France such as Renault and CEA.
Thomas is member of the editorial board of Creativity and Innovation Management and European Management Review, he is involved in the scientific committee of the Innovation and Product Development Management conference. His research findings appear in several top management journals such as Academy of Management Discoveries, Research Policy, Journal of Product Innovation Management, European Management Review and general management magazines including Harvard Business Review. Thomas Gillier and has been visiting several universities such as at Babson College (USA), Mines Paris Tech (France), LBG Open Innovation in Science Center (Austria), MIT Innovation Lab (USA) and Rotterdam School of Management (Netherlands).
- Creativity
- Crowdsourcing
- Innovation Management
- Open Foresight
- Open Innovation
- Technology Entrepreneurship
Cours enseignés à Grenoble Ecole de Management :
- Design Thinking and Innovation - Master - Depuis 2011
- Futures, Foresight and Product Design - Formation Continue - De 2014 à 2016
- Innovation Management - Master - Depuis 2011
- Innovation Management - Master
- Product Design & New Product Development - Master
- Entrepreneurship & Innovation
- Gillier T., Cayrol A., Kokshagina Olga O., 2026.Leading the Crowd in Open Collaboration for Scientific Discovery: The Informational Role of Emotions under Radical UncertaintyResearch Policy, 55, 4: 105453Open collaboration is increasingly used to advance scientific discovery, yet sustaining participation remains difficult when leadership is informal and problems are open-ended. We study projects from Polymath—a large-scale open collaborative initiative in which mathematicians jointly work on unsolved mathematical problems under conditions of extreme epistemic and social uncertainty. Drawing on public online discussion data from four Polymath projects and using computerized text analysis, we examine how leaders’ emotional expressions facilitate continued participation. We find that leaders’ emotional expressions are associated with higher crowd participation. This effect does not happen through emotional contagion but through cognitive inference. Participants interpret leaders’ emotions as informational cues that help them contribute despite radical uncertainty. The relationship weakens when leaders’ emotions are framed as questions rather than affirmative statements, suggesting that clarity in emotional signaling matters for sustaining participation. These findings show how emergent epistemic leadership operates as leaders shape collective inquiry not through formal coordination but by signaling meaning and direction through emotions.
- Mahaney J., Gillier T., Schweitzer F., 2025.Championing new ideas with consultationJournal of Product Innovation Management, 42, 3: 614-638
- Gillier T., Bayus . B., Torral Marin S., Martínez-Torres R., 2024.Creative Elaboration: When Persistence Outperforms Flexibility84th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, Academy of Management, Chicago, Etats-Unis
- Gillier T., Bayus . B., Toral Martin S., Martínez-Torres R., 2024.Crearivity revision : self -elaborate or delegate your idea31st Innovation and Product Development Management Conference, IPDM, Dublin, Irlande
- Gillier T., Seidel V., Kazakçi A., Piat G., 2024.Crafting Future Innovations: The Network Structure of Ideas for Visionary Product ConceptsAcademy of Management Discoveries, 10, 4: 611-629While much innovation work is focused on pragmatic product concepts that solve a problem, at times the goal is instead to set out a vision for possible products of the future, such as with “concept cars” in automotive firms or the work of corporate innovation labs. Visionary product concepts—conveyed by verbal descriptions and visual prototypes—provide ideas from which subsequent innovations will be developed. The paradoxical tensions for these concepts are that they need to be open to incomplete convergence to a large set of ideas while still being coherent, and they must integrate both novelty and feasibility. Our exploratory research questions were: What practices support the generation of visionary product concepts? What are the relationships among the ideas that result? We studied ten teams developing visionary product concepts and examined the links they made between ideas, discovering differences in network structure among them. Effective visionary concepts relied on three practices that together shifted from initial ideas, tightly linked novel ideas, and selectively integrated ideas for coherence. We contribute an understanding of visionary product concepts generation practices that help to integrate paradoxical tensions between openness and coherence, and novelty and feasibility.
- Beck S., LaFlamme M., Bergenholtz C., Bogers M., Brasseur T.-M., Conradsen M. L., Gillier T., Et. Al. ., 2023.Examining Open Innovation in Science (OIS): what Open Innovation can and cannot offer the science of scienceInnovation : organization & management, 25, 3: 221-235Scholars across disciplines increasingly hear calls for more open and collaborative approaches to scientific research. The concept of Open Innovation in Science (OIS) provides a framework that integrates dispersed research efforts aiming to understand the antecedents, contingencies, and consequences of applying open and collaborative research practices. While the OIS framework has already been taken up by science of science scholars, its conceptual underpinnings require further specification. In this essay, we critically examine the OIS concept and bring to light two key aspects: 1) how OIS builds upon Open Innovation (OI) research by adopting its attention to boundary-crossing knowledge flows and by adapting other concepts developed and researched in OI to the science context, as exemplified by two OIS cases in the area of research funding; 2) how OIS conceptualises knowledge flows across boundaries. While OI typically focuses on well-defined organisational boundaries, we argue that blurry and even invisible boundaries between communities of practice may more strongly constrain flows of knowledge related to openness and collaboration in science. Given the uptake of this concept, this essay brings needed clarity to the meaning of OIS, which has no particular normative orientation towards a close coupling between science and industry. We end by outlining the essay’s contributions to OI and the science of science, as well as to science practitioners.
- Gillier T., 2023.When creators revise their new ideas: the effect of cognitive persistence on creative elaboration30th IPDM : Innovation and Product Development Management Conference, Innovation and Product Development Management, Milano, Italie
- Beck S., Bergenholtz C., Bogers M., Brasseur T.-M., Conradsen M. L., Di Marco D., Distel A. P., Dobusch . L., Dörler D., Effert A., Fecher B., Filiou D., Frederiksen L., Gillier T., Et. Al .., 2022.The Open Innovation in Science research field: a collaborative conceptualisation approachIndustry and Innovation, 29, 2: 136-185Openness and collaboration in scientific research are attracting increasing attention from scholars and practitioners alike. However, a common understanding of these phenomena is hindered by disciplinary boundaries and disconnected research streams. We link dispersed knowledge on Open Innovation, Open Science, and related concepts such as Responsible Research and Innovation by proposing a unifying Open Innovation in Science (OIS) Research Framework. This framework captures the antecedents, contingencies, and consequences of open and collaborative practices along the entire process of generating and disseminating scientific insights and translating them into innovation. Moreover, it elucidates individual-, team-, organisation-, field-, and society-level factors shaping OIS practices. To conceptualise the framework, we employed a collaborative approach involving 47 scholars from multiple disciplines, highlighting both tensions and commonalities between existing approaches. The OIS Research Framework thus serves as a basis for future research, informs policy discussions, and provides guidance to scientists and practitioners.
- Gillier T., Bayus . B., 2022.Group creativity in the wild: When building on ideas enhances the generation and selection of creative ideasCreativity and Innovation Management, 31, 3: 430-446Long-standing wisdom holds that building on ideas is beneficial for group creativity. We empirically verify this recommended practice. We analyse creativity sessions of nine groups of professionals tasked to synthesize new ideas into one final creative concept. Linkography and quantitative analysis are used for analysing the impact of building on ideas on group creativity. First, the results indicate that building on ideas does not lead to more novel, feasible, or useful ideas. Second, our study shows that building on ideas is beneficial only if the ideators build upon the “right” ideas. Ideators generate more novel ideas only when they build on novel ideas. Moreover, our research reveals a trade-off: Building on novel ideas leads to more novel but less feasible ideas while building on familiar ideas leads to less novel but more feasible ideas. Finally, we find that stimulus ideas (i.e., ideas that are built upon) are more likely to be selected and integrated into the final concept. Taken together, our results indicate that building on novel ideas enhances the generation and selection processes. Implications for theory and research on creativity in organizations are discussed.
- Gillier T., Bayus . B., 2022.Pour des idées réellement créatives, enfreignez les règles du brainstormingHarvard Business review France: Online
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