Creative methodologies for understanding a creative industry

Objectives The production of innovation or novelty in creative interactions is normally represented in research either as normative patterns of behaviour (being creative) or as post-hoc empirical objects (new firms, new products etc.) The structure of creative practices, i.e. what particular forms of interactivity produce successful novelty (i.e. which becomes ‘normal’ and not novel, which creates and captures value), is not well researched. This paper provides a ‘digital economy’ perspective of the creative industries as a micro-level example of a wider analytical problem, which is how society changes itself. The increasing level of innovation and creativity produces greater levels of instability in social structures (habits, norms etc.) Completely new industries can arise (and ‘creatively’ destroy old ones) as new stabilised patterns form, particularly where entry costs are tumbling, such as digital milieu. Prior Work The authors have undertaken a stream of research that utilises the field of entrepreneurship to study the emergence of novelty. This has been informed by entrepreneurship theories (e.g. effectuation), by complexity theory (e.g. emergence) by constructionist theory (e.g. patterning and identity formation) and by critical realism (morphological perspectives). Approach Observations of workshops over several days with creative groups, interviews with creative enterprises, literature reviews on creative industries, business models and value systems have informed the analysis and conceptualisation. Results We present a conceptual framework that we suggest can capture how novelty arises as emergent order over time. We have extended previous work that investigates the significance of emergence in theorising entrepreneurship into an exploration of how to articulate the creation and flow of value and effective ontology in a creative landscape Implications In the digital economy, the creative industries revolve around dynamic, innovative and often unorthodox collaborations, whereby numerous large, small and micro-businesses come together for the duration of a project, then disband and form new partnerships for the next project. Research designs must therefore address multiple contexts and levels presenting an analytical challenge to researchers. Value Methodologically, we suggest that the framework has analytical potential to support the collection of data: ordering and categorising empirical observations concerning how different phenomena emerge over time across multiple levels of analysis and contexts. Conceptually, the work broadens the notions of ‘business model’ to consider value creating systems and particular states reached by those systems in their evolution.