PI: Prof. Ulrich Weinberg, Dr. Claudia Nicolai

Abstract

Multidisciplinary teamwork is a key requirement in the design thinking approach to engineering innovation. In industry and academia, design managers and instructors often put individuals into teams and take them through the various activities of design thinking with only little understanding about characteristics that make a design team effective in terms of the teamwork process and innovative outcome. Design thinking can be described as a process in which multidisciplinary teams define challenges, and then actively and iteratively develop new knowledge to solve them. This poses questions about how design thinking teams actually process knowledge, and more importantly how they generate new knowledge that will lead to new problem solutions. Our proposed research aims to improve this current situation by providing design thinking managers, coaches and instructors a scientifically validated tool for augmentation of design team performance.

The questions that guide our joint research project together with the Stanford project group “IDN-Analysis” (Roth/Sonalkar) are

• How can we diagnose design thinking team interaction patterns that influence knowledge creation processes and outcomes?
• How can we influence team interactions to improve design thinking-performances towards effective knowledge creation?