Creative ideas are born out of conscious, semiconscious, and superconscious mental sorting, grouping, matching and melding. Interpersonal interactions at the conscious level stimulate and enhance these activities.

Social interaction is especially critical for innovation teams of individuals responsible for delivering new products, services, and organizational processes.

Along the innovation process, the innovation pattern occurs as fractals, with small decision cycles embedded in large ones, and with individual choices made within the confines of a hierarchy of prior, larger scope individual or group choices.

Creative cross-functional team activity is not confined to the initial stages of the overall innovative effort but is essential to such downstream activities as launching of a new product/service, implementing a new compensation system in an organization, or improving the service-profit chain.

At any point in an innovation process, team leaders need to exercise the loose-tight approach – manage both the expansion of thoughts that gives rise to potentially creative alternatives and the homing of a viable option.