Creativity in Multidisciplinary New Product Development Teams

New product development is usually teamwork. Product development teams are created that 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 traditional view of creativity may not apply. This view, 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, continues to be influential. As a result, much of the dynamics of ‘newness-generation' and ‘newness-reception' in organizations remains to be studied. This paper describes the organization of new product development in a number of medium-sized companies. It will discuss the theoretical issues of newness generation in multidisciplinary new product development teams and newness reception in the larger organization, and present the results of a series of exploratory interviews