Innovation is a pervasively cross-functional process. When ideas meet and information comes together, you bring innovations to market smarter and faster.

A synergized diversity of ideas and opinions are needed to generate high quality solutions.

New Product Development by Cross-functional Teams

Recommendations to → Top Executives⁴

• Communicate expectations. Expectations of innovation are key. Make it clear that the team is expected to undertake → experimentation and risk taking, rather than incremental improvement of current products and processes... More

Innovation Team

Creativity and Social Interaction²

• Creative ideas do not arise spontaneously but are born out of conscious, semiconscious, and unconscious mental sorting, grouping, matching and melding. Interpersonal interactions at the conscious level stimulate and enhance these activities.  >>>

• At any point in an innovation process, → team leaders need to exercise the → loose-tight approach – manage both the expansion of thoughts that gives rise to potentially creative alternatives and the homing of a viable option... More

Cross-functional Team Meetings

• Build a sense of informality, trust, and shared understanding of the future... More

Why Cross-Functional Teams?

Innovation, the source of sustainable competitive advantage for most companies, depends upon the individual and collective expertise of employees. In today's era of systemic innovation, it is more important for an organization to be cross-functionally excellent than functionally excellent. In addition to formal planning at the business level, best-practice companies use crosscutting initiatives on major issues in order to challenge assumptions and open up the organization to new thinking.

Creativity of Groups

In cross-functional teams, individuals from different backgrounds draw upon their pools of tacit, as well as explicit knowledge, to contribute... More