Ephemeral emergents and anticipation in online connected creativity

In this paper, we seek to address the challenge of online connected creativity by studying the emergence of novelty in the ‘Sensory Threads’ project, a six-month project currently underway as part of the EPSRC cluster project, http://www.creatorproject.org/, (EP/G002088/1), New Research Processes and Business Models for the Creative Industries. The cluster brings together practitioners from the creative industries with researchers from varied traditions that span ICT, the arts and humanities, the social sciences, and business studies, through the establishment of pilot projects, such as Sensory Threads that have a creative, technical and value-creating dimension. The paper extends previous conceptual and methodological work concerning the capture of the emergence of novelty and processes of learning and knowledge transfer in on-line settings comprising multiple actors, uncertain outcomes and diffuse data sources. The UK is renowned for its creative industries in areas as diverse as music, animation, design, gaming and the visual and creative arts. It has been estimated that the creative industries account for 7.3% of the UK economy, parallel in size therefore to the financial services industry (DCMS, 2007). The livelihood of a growing proportion of UK citizens therefore depends upon the sector maintaining its growth trajectory, particularly in the South East. Together with London and parts of the East of England and South West, the South East region forms a "mega region" of world class significance in relation to the creative economy. The David Powell report (2002) suggests that the creative industries employ more than half a million people in the South East and contribute more than 40 billion to the regional economy. Creative and cultural industries represent around 30 per cent of its GDP, making it our region's fastest growing sector. Good understanding of the challenges and opportunities presented by the sector is therefore important from a regional development point of view. Yet studying the sector presents challenges from a research point of view:  A diverse range of increasingly cross-linked industries (e.g. arts, culture, heritage, gaming, performance, sports)  The potential for many inter-related (aesthetic) artefacts and services  Digital technology can establish new resonances between social practices and the technocreative milieu  The need for continually (re) organising entrepreneurial & innovative team collaborations around new projects  Novel, sometimes unorthodox, combinations of people and technologies for which there may be no precedent  Values issues regarding interchange of artistic, cultural, social capitals (particularly where creative output is critical or challenging of powerful groupings). Inevitably then, our research designs must address multiple contexts, locations (virtual and physical) and levels of analysis presenting an analytical challenge to management researchers (Pettigrew et al, 2001). In this paper, we seek to address this challenge by studying the emergence of novelty in the ‘Sensory Threads’ project, a six-month project currently underway as part of the EPSRC cluster project, http://www.creatorproject.org/, (EP/G002088/1), New Research Processes and Business Models for the Creative Industries. The cluster brings together practitioners from the creative industries with researchers from varied traditions that span ICT, the arts and humanities, the social sciences, and business studies, through the establishment of pilot projects, such as Sensory Threads that have a creative, technical and value-creating dimension. Sensory Threads is based on earlier (and ongoing) collaborative work between the creative arts organisation Proboscis and Birkbeck College, on developing participatory sensing projects: building