Technological Support To Improvisation During crisis: An Image Theory Based Approach

Improvisation is a core dimension of crisis response. It helps organizations to deal with complexity and to figure innovative responses to crisis in a short delay. Still, our knowledge on how improvisation develops cognitively is scarce. As a result, managers miss tools that would support improvisation cognitively. This paper aims at responding to this need, by reviewing literature on crisis and improvisation to develop an artifact and deduce requirements for technology. We rely on the Image Theory developed by Beach (1998) to conceptualize improvisation as a double step cognitive process that includes the screening process. Based on the use of ontologies and semantic distance, we then translate our understanding into a set of IT requirements, which will eventually help us designing the IT artifact.