Financial Post: Innovation: Group dynamics can stifle a great idea
For most companies, conventional wisdom says that collaborative teams offer the best path to generating compelling innovation. Behind this notion is that high-performance and diverse groups are best suited to cope with technology complexity, commercialization challenges and as well as stick handle through management gates such as securing buy-in and resources. In fact, I have argued this point in my blog on a number of occasions. A recent Wharton research paper suggests that other innovation strategies could be more effective.
Professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich contend that common group dynamics are anathema to developing breakthrough products, unique ways to save money or revolutionary business models. Instead, they believe the next Facebook, Twitter or iPad could best be germinated by an inspired innovator with plenty of time to ponder and experiment. If this approach sounds familiar, it has been the modus operandi for some of the most famous inventors including Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers and Steve Jobs.
The researchers undertook a series of experiments to understand which of two different innovation processes – the conventional team-centred model and a hybrid individual/team approach — delivered the greatest number of high quality new product ideas. In the traditional model, peers were encouraged to collaborate to produce new ideas. With the hybrid approach, individuals were first encouraged to brainstorm and refine new ideas by themselves and then to present them to a group for vetting and elevation.
The study concluded that the hybrid process resulted in three times more ideas than the team-based process. More importantly, the findings also showed that the hybrid approach generated (on average) significantly better quality ideas, including the most preferred idea in the experiment. These findings run counter to current innovation best practice which stresses team-focused models.
A hybrid process is more successful because it can mitigate the harmful effects of group dynamics and catalyze more “out of the box” thinking. …
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