Does knowledge reuse make a creative person more creative?

This paper examines the effect of the most common type of organizational knowledge management system, that is, an intranet-based knowledge repository, on the level of creative performance of an individual. An experiment was conducted on more than a hundred individuals to investigate the quantitative and qualitative levels of creativity outcomes on an open-ended business task. Their levels of baseline creativity skills were also measured in order to inspect its interaction with knowledge reuse. The results suggest that knowledge reuse resulting from this repository type of knowledge management system actually inhibits the creative performance of individuals, especially on the qualitative dimension.