Measuring creative performance of teams through dynamic semantic social network analysis

In this project we compare communication structure and content exchanged by members of creative, interdisciplinary teams of medical researchers, physicians, patients and caretakers with their creative output. We find that longitudinal social networking patterns and word usage predict creative performance. We collected the e-mail archives of 60 members of a community of researchers working on 12 projects improving various aspects of the daily lives of patients with Crohn’s disease. Our results indicate that more creative projects show a decrease in group density, while more actors are involved, and more e-mails are exchanged, suggesting that a more successful project attracts more attention from many different people. We also found that members of more creative projects use more outspoken language, which gets more focused over time.