Matthew A. Cronin is a professor of management at George Mason University. He received his PhD in organizational behavior from Carnegie Mellon University.

Cronin’s research seeks to understand how collaboration can help produce creative ideas, and what it takes to then bring these ideas to fruition. Innovation begins with a creative idea or notion, and so one stream of Cronin’s research focuses on the generation of creative ideas, especially how people come to discover useful interactions. Once produced, creative ideas require instantiation in the task environment. Thus the second stream of Cronin’s research explores the process by which innovative ideas are accepted and implemented by others.

Interests

• Increasing creativity through collaboration

• The mechanics of insight in problem solving

• How interpersonal factors (in particular, respect) influence collaboration

• Negotiation and integrative bargaining

• Dynamic decision making and learning