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Creativity, technology and innovation are fundamental driving forces that often trigger behavioural and cultural changes in our societies. Several studies on creative collaborations emphasise the interconnection between the creation of innovation and interdisciplinarity. Studying the interdisciplinary processes through which innovation is generated is thus of fundamental importance. The Creative Connectivity project investigates the links between group dynamics and interdisciplinary creative processes in the attempt to identify the emergence of meaningful behavioural patterns. Taking the Innovation Design Engineering (IDE) programme at the Royal College of Art as a case study, the research addresses the need to develop a more rigorous understanding of the creation of innovation fostered by diversity, a risk-taking culture and acceptance of failure. A novel approach combining data science and network theory has been developed to monitor, quantify and analyse specific dynamics of interdisciplinary groups of students at the IDE programme. The focus was to investigate the network contribution to the performance of a team in an environment that is naturally interdisciplinary by using data respectively from a bespoke developed web application and a conversation activity monitoring system. Initial findings have shown the potential of this approach to unveiling the hidden mechanisms behind creativity and the production of innovation through interdisciplinary approaches. The results of this research could be of interest for universities, research centres, start-ups incubators, and policymakers who want to foster creativity and trigger innovative processes. © 2019 Institution of Engineering Designers, The Design Society.

Au nanostructured film was deposited on mica by room temperature RF sputtering. The growth mechanism of the film was studied analyzing the evolution of the film morphology as a function of its thickness by the atomic forcemicroscopy. In the early stages of a growth the film evolution proceeds by the nucleation and growth of nanoclusters. After a critical thickness the growth of microclusters formed by the joining of nanoclusters in preferential nucleation sites, onto a quasicontinuous film, is observed. We quantified the evolution of the mean nanoclusters height and surface density and of the film roughness. This data were analyzed by the dynamic scaling theory of growing interfaces obtaining the scaling and roughness exponents z and ² whose values suggest a conservative growth process. We also quantified the growth of the microclusters showing that it is consistent with a coalescence/impingement dynamic. About the formation of the microclusters, furthermore, we speculate that their origin is strongly correlated to the features of the sputtering technique in connection with the deposition on a high-diffusivity substrate.

A terpyridine-functionalized perylene bisimide chromophore (TPBI) has been used as a building block in the stepwise, layer-by-layer fabrication of self-assembled Fe-TPBI multilayers on gold, with the assembled supramolecular chains oriented approximately perpendicular to the gold surface. Time-resolved spectroscopy measurements seem to indicate that the energy absorbed by the multilayer is promptly dissipated to the gold surface by ultrafast processes.