Successful development of solutions in teams: Theoretical and empirical analyses

Increasing technical and organisational complexity, together with a general feeling that 'the whole can be more than the sum of the parts' seem to be the most important reasons for the shift from individual oriented designer work towards team based projects. Solution generation, particularly, is considered to be of special value for groups due to the addition of different perspectives. In contrast to this empirical data reveals that groups actually make a lot of mistakes, mostly in terms of coordination and cooperation. In the first part of this paper solution generation in groups is described as a creative process with requirements relating to the problem and the group. In the second and third part an empirical study is presented that aims at investigating design teams in practice. In the context of the analysis of 10 different projects important mechanisms in successful solution search situations are analysed. In the last part of the paper, some general remarks based on the results of this investigation are presented.