When interaction flows: an exploration of collective creative processes on a collaborative governance board

There is a growing awareness of the significance of collective creativity in dealing with the complex problems typical of today’s rapidly changing society. Whereas studies on collective creativity provide insight into what happens during creative episodes in terms of a changing meaning of the interaction content, they do not explain what happens in the conversational interaction process. To shed light on this, we introduce and define the concept of interaction flow. Interaction flow was observed during creative episodes in the board meetings of Platform Inspire, an innovation-oriented collaborative governance board in Western Europe. The concept of interaction flow makes collective creative episodes more observable and offers points of attention for facilitating these episodes.