An application of social network analysis to assess virtual innovation team performance

This paper analyzes the existing relationship between the structural configuration of a virtual innovation team and its creative performance. The term structural configuration is intended to mean the approach utilised by the group in the management and decision-making phases regarding both the communicative structure and the decisional structure. The following factors are considered in order to analyse the communicative structure: two parameters of Social Network Analysis (network degree centralization and flow betweenness centralization), the variety of utilization of Information and Communication Technologies (the average number of technologies adopted by the team as channels of communication with respect to those available), and the internal variability in the use of these technologies (measuring the level of uniformity of the internal trend to communicate by means of these various channels). The decisional style is one of the structural indixes and is used to refer to the nature of the decision-making process within the group. Various aspects of creative performance are measured based on Torrance’s classification of ideas in his evaluation of creativity (the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, 1969), and hence the following indixes are defined: Fluency is the subject’s ability to generate various proposals in the course of the creative process; Flexibility is the ability to produce versatile solutions, which may be classified into various conceptual categories; and Originality is the ability to identify unique solutions.