Team Creativity in New Product Development

Abstract

New product development is usually teamwork. Product development teams are cross-functional, representing different functional units, or multidisciplinary, involving several disciplines, or both. In any case, conceiving and developing new products is a joint effort, which means that the standard view of creativity may not apply – a view that is characterized by a focus on individuals as agents of creativity and by the assumption that creativity is a unilateral quality, not a reciprocal or interactive phenomenon. As a result, significant parts of the dynamics of ‘newness-generation’ and ‘newness- reception’ in organizations are still to be addressed. This paper describes the organization of new product development in a number of medium-sized companies. Discussed are the theoretical issues of newness generation in multidisciplinary new product development teams and newness reception in the larger organization. The results of a series of exploratory interviews are presented.