Individual creativity and team engineering design: a taxonomy for team composition

In 2012, the authors developed a competition called "Design Wars," an all-day team design competition modeled on reality television competitions such as Project Runway or Junkyard Wars. The purpose of the competition was to test the student teams' abilities to develop creative solutions to an open ended problem given limited time and unconventional resources. One question that arose while developing the competition was the impact that individual creativity and team creative composition would have on the final product. The results were somewhat surprising; teams with the highest average scores of individual creativity performed the worst in judging of the creativity of the final product. While the reasons for this are unclear, the most likely reasons were a) lack of time to incubate creative ideas b) an inability to articulate creative ideas physically in the constructed project or c) a limit in the ability of creative, or divergent, thinkers to converge upon a single solution. Additionally, teams that had a large range of individual creativity scores, or more specifically, a single dominant "creative" thinker, also failed to score well in the creativity potion of the competition The current work in progress examines the composition of design teams to develop a taxonomy based on a) average team scores of individual team member creativity and b) range of individual creativity on a team. Based on the Innovation Phase Model (IPM), different phases of innovation emphasize different dominant thinking processes. The IPM includes the stages of Invention (preparation, activation, generation, illumination, verification) and Exploitation (communication and validation). Teams that excel in invention may not excel in exploitation. Alternatively, some teams may actualize their ideas very well, but may not have the same ability to generate fluency and flexibility and novelty in their solutions. By categorizing team characteristics, we can examine if specific team compositions are more likely to perform well in specific phases of the IPM. The current focus is on the divergent stages of Invention including activation (problem definition) and generation (fluency in solutions) as well as the convergent stage of illumination (reduction to a few promising solutions.) The overall objective will be to develop strategies specific to team composition that improve performance in all phases of innovation.