Studying the creative industries in the Digital Economy presents challenges, including:

• 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
• The potential that digital technology can establish new resonances between social practices and the techno-creative milieu
• The need for continually (re) organising entrepreneurial & innovative team collaborations around new projects
• The emergence of novel, sometimes unorthodox, combinations of people and technologies for which there may be no precedent
• The potential for values issues to cause clashes regarding interchange of artistic, cultural, social capitals (particularly where creative output is critical or challenging of powerful groupings).

These activities take place in a business environment that is fast-moving, has high market uncertainty and has indeterminate outcomes, as new technologies continue to evolve and standards and legislative practices surrounding their use are unclear. Better understanding of how new value creating systems emerge in such landscapes can give us a better insight into how such processes can be managed and supported, thereby contributing, in a small way, to the sustainability of the creative industries overall. Yet the very diversity and fluidity of such ecosystems presents a considerable challenge to traditional models of research into business innovation and entrepreneurship.

Thus, this troubadour study was used to develop workable methods for capturing the dynamics of such systems, based on some earlier work that Ted Fuller http://www.lincoln.ac.uk/lbs/staff/2312.asp and Lorraine Warren http://www.management.soton.ac.uk/people/details.php?Name=LorraineWarren& had carried out previously applying complexity theory to the study of entrepreneurial firms. We worked with other Creator projects including Gesture and Embodied Interaction, http://culturelab.ncl.ac.uk/creator/gesture_and_embodied_interaction_overview2.pdf and Sensory Threads, http://socialtapestries.net/sensorythreads/, as well as an applied research compan at Southampton Science Park, IT-Innovation, http://www.it-innovation.soton.ac.uk/.

Our approach was to work with actors in live projects in order to examine how novelty emerges over time in dynamic, fluid domains where uncertainty is high and outcomes are indeterminate.

As entrepreneurship researchers, we have asked questions concerning how entrepreneurs maintain agility, the ability to see ahead, to strategise in an innovative manner, to act at the right time to repeatedly achieve and maintain competitive edge in such uncertain and unpredictable environments. Our previous research has shown that these processes are not planned or formalised. Rather, they are a 'way of being', the essence of agility and foresight for the entrepreneurs we have worked with. We argue that it is the multi-dimensional concentration on these patterns of behaviour that is at the heart of entrepreneurial competence through effective strategising over time to produce a sustainable endeavour.  Over time, we see the emergence of new structures: products, services , behaviours, identities, business models - yet not all structures persist to the point where they are fully implemented or developed.

We used this project as an empirical testbed for a methodological approach that seeks to capture the emergence of novelty from creative acts. While the data will take some time to analyse, this troubadour project has in the short term enabled us to test a framework that enables and supports experimental design, data collection, data analysis and reflective evaluation of the emergence of novelty, with very promising results. More significantly, it has enabled the development of a methodological agenda for capturing social value and social resonances for future projects in the creative industries/digital economy milieu. By developing insight in this area, we hope to better articulate how leading edge creative firms and groupings contribute to the creative industries ecosystem overall - and correspondingly, we hope, improve their sustainability.