Methodological issues arising from research into the emergence of enterprise in the creative industries

In the digital economy, the creative industries revolve around dynamic, innovative and often unorthodox collaborations between individuals and organisations. Large, small and micro-businesses often come together for the duration of a project, then disband and form new partnerships for the next project. During such projects, novelty emerges in the form of new products, services, business models or patterns of consumer/producer behaviour. The structure of novelty-creating practices, i.e. the interactions within one-off dynamic project groups is not well understood. Firstly, it spans multiple levels of analysis (individuals, groups, organisations, society); secondly, creativity in the digital domain often has unpredictable outcomes as the availability and potential of technology changes so rapidly. This presents a challenge for research design. Latterly, we have undertaken a stream of research that utilises the theoretical field of entrepreneurship to study the emergence of novelty. Here we extend that work by presenting a conceptual framework that we suggest can capture how novelty emerges over time. Methodologically, we suggest that the framework has analytical potential too, in that it could be used to support effectively the collection of data: ordering and categorising empirical observations concerning how different phenomena emerge over time across multiple levels of analysis and contexts.