Selecting Appropriate Communication Tools to Support Teams' Creative Processes in SMEs

Abstract

Accomplishing creative tasks collaboratively is particularly problematic when team members who are attempting to achieve the creative results are geographically dispersed throughout the globe in a virtual team. Therefore, sound communication tools are needed to ensure communication does not hamper team creativity. This chapter highlights the communication tools available for doing creative work, offering a short analysis of the most relevant synchronous and asynchronous communication tools. Some rules and tips are given to allow for a better choice of the communication tools to use according to both the nature of the team and the work it is performing in terms of creative processes in SMEs. This chapter also presents how knowledge experts and knowledge-based companies consider whether it would be any benefit to apply Web 2.0 in their organisational architecture to strengthen collaboration.