Knowledge Management in New Product Development: Leading Innovation Teams

Product development is the process of bringing a new product to the marketplace. The product development process engages mixed teams with personnel from design, engineering, manufacturing and marketing working in tandem at all times. Given the complexity of the information flows in such a process, value creation in product development is almost exclusively based on intangible resources. The successful management of intellectual capital has emerged as a key condition for effective organizational learning in the innovation process. Empirical research in the past has provided some evidence that a team leader's emotional intelligence impacts new product outcomes. Recent research however indicates that emotional intelligence at the individual team member level may contribute more to creativity in new product development. The objective of this paper is to present a pilot study to assess the way group member emotional competencies impact the success of the innovation process in the presence of moderating factor such as project complexity. In this context, 22 scientists and engineers were asked to work in small groups and tasked to develop a few innovative product and service concepts. The concepts presented were assessed both in terms of their perceived complexity and in terms of their presumed performance in the market. The data collected were then analyzed against the emotional intelligence makeup of the members of each group. The aggregation of the findings of this pilot study in a small number of classes was used to identify only major trends in the data. The moderating effect of project complexity on the relationship between emotional intelligence of the design group and success in product development projects was thus assessed in detail. The results of the pilot study indicate that emotional intelligence improves team interactions, facilitates the management of intellectual capital and does indeed affect innovation performance.