Since 2008, the HPI-Stanford Design Thinking Program has been a program of multidisciplinary teams with different backgrounds in the natural sciences, engineering, the humanities, and design that explore the phenomenon of innovation from various dimensions. The program is funded by the Hasso Plattner Foundation. The research teams explore the complex interaction between members of multidisciplinary teams who face the challenge of creating innovation for difficult problems. An important feature is the need for creative collaboration across spatial, temporal and cultural boundaries. In the context of disciplinary diversity, we investigate how design thinking interacts with traditional engineering and management approaches, in particular why the structure of successful design teams is fundamentally different from traditional team structures in companies.