The Emergence of Creativity, Innovation and Leadership in Micro-level Social Interactions and How to Research It

Abstract

The moment-to-moment unfolding of innovation, creativity and leadership is complex, non-linear, recursive, largely tacit and influenced by micro-level social interactions. The methodology InnoTracing supported by the software InnoTrace enables insights into the black box of such emergent, situated processes by visualizing what participants regard as their particular ‘‘moments of significance’’ (MOS) as they (according to participants subjective opinion) relate to creativity, leadership, and innovation unfolding in real time. By gathering, aggregating, and analyzing real-time data with a software tool InnoTrace, previously invisible micro-level social interactions are observed. The InnoTracing methodology, a complement to the software InnoTrace, is a further development of ethnomethodological methods, aiming to deal with such user-generated data. This provides a way to study creativity, innovation and leadership processes as they unfold in real time among various actors. This paper explains the InnoTrace software and InnoTracing methodology and presents first data results from one empirical study.

Article history: Received (02.08.2014); Revised (26.10.2014); Accepted (18.11.2014)