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INTRODUCTION

Our perception of the creative formation of organizations has changed dra-matically during the past years. For a long time, creativity was considered in terms of managing a smali business or being an artist. However, creativity is not directly associated with the particular context. We can consider essentially con-text-free organizational creativity. Nearly the same was for cognition. Previ-ously, cognition was linked with abilities to perceive and recognize, nowadays it is developed as foundation of artificial intelligence. Cognition and creativity are eąually likely to be present in corporations’ development efforts and in the iden-tification of new markets and technologies as in the project of public organizations or in the oiganization of universities. Creative activities are taking place when neither the goal nor often the initial conditions are known at the start, but constructed during the process. Taking into account the discussion above, the re-search articles included in this book use the terms cognition and creativity to re-fer to an individual or a community of individuals that realize their business supported by ICT in their operational environments.

The aim of this book is to improve our understanding of cognition and crea-tivity support system environments. The various research articles analyse crea-tive and innovative activities in the case studies or just through provision of aca-demic discussions. The book’s focus is on identifying and understanding the factors relating to the working environment that are conducive to human creativ-ity and cognition.

The book is likely to be of interest to students and scholars in a number of research fields as well as to business policy decision makers concemed with research, teaching and policy measures for the development of cognitive informa-tion systems and creativity support system environments.

The thirteen research articles forming the book illustrate various approaches to the analysis of cognition and creativity support systems. The research articles were discussed at the intemational sessions within the 28th Conference on Organizational Support Systems at University of Economics in Katowice. The con-struction of cognition and creativity support systems involves the development of agile organizations and is located in the area of interdisciplinary research. The