Destruction through collaboration: How terrorists work together toward malevolent innovation

Terrorism provides a rich yet understudied domain to examine creative teams. Because teams working in a violent ideological organization must continue to generate covert and novel ways to recruit members, raise finances, and plan attacks, theories of creativity typically applied to more conventional organizations should also apply to terrorist teams. However, with limited empirical data about this phenomenon, it is unclear which tenets of creative research hold versus which do not translate in the domain of violent extremist organizations. The present effort reviews the extant literature on malevolent creativity, as well as examines predictors of innovation in a longitudinal dataset of teams operating in 50 terrorist organizations. In addition, a case study of a historically creative team operating in the Aum Shinrikyo is examined.