A Virtual Environment to Support the Distributed Design of Large Made-to-Order Products

An overview of a virtual design environment (virtual platform) developed as part of the European Commission funded VRShips-ROPAX (VRS) project is presented. The main objectives for the development of the virtual platform are described, followed by the discussion of the techniques chosen to address the objectives, and finally a description of a use-case for the platform. Whilst the focus of the VRS virtual platform was to facilitate the design of ROPAX (roll-on passengers and cargo) vessels, the components within the platform are entirely generic and may be applied to the distributed design of any type of vessel, or other complex made-to-order products.

Enhancing Flexibility in Dispersed Product Development Teams

Highly creative product development teams are exploring the unknown. Initial plans are likely to change as they understand better how the customer will use the product they are developing, as competitive products appear, and as new technologies evolve. Thus, a creative team must remain open to change as its plans shift. If the team is dispersed (virtual), the complications of dealing with changes in plans magnify. This chapter provides tools and approaches for being flexible to such changes as creative teams proceed. These include ways of lowering the cost of change, anticipating change, isolating change, and maintaining options as late as possible. Such tools and approaches will help teams working on highly creative projects to take advantage of their creativity, even when they are dispersed over time and distance.

Tools and Technology to Support Creativity in Virtual Teams

This chapter examines the ways in which currently available software applications can support the creative process in general, and designers, in particular, working in virtual teams. It follows the main stages in the design process, examining how existing software can support the creative process. Emerging innovations for each stage of the design process are also presented. The chapter provides examples of tools, considering their strengths and limitations, and speculates on future directions for software development to support creativity and collaboration within virtual teams.

Fostering Creativity in Global Virtual Teams

This chapter presents insights from conversations with global team leaders on how to foster creativity in global virtual project teams in the field of product development. It shows how the leaders pay attention to team formation and managing the group dynamics in order to create a climate in which creativity will flourish. They then harness creativity by balancing the roles of motivating their team members in order to encourage fresh thinking and “putting on the brakes” where necessary in order to create something both new and viable. In particular, risk-averse team members are encouraged to be matter-of-fact about risk, making risk evaluation an intrinsic part of idea generation.

A Spatial Environment for Design Dialogue

This chapter offers a spatial concept of the way virtual design team work. It is concerned with two problems that face creative teams today: (1) that the design process is carried out through a diverse range of digital media, which are not or only poorly integrated and (2) that the digital tools used by virtual teams are not designed for virtual team work but used in a very pragmatic way, which often limits the creative efficiency. The chapter argues that space has a structure and that we can use that structure to navigate and place information in space and thereby create a design space with the virtuality and creativity of an open ‘reflection-in-action.’ Further, it argues that we have to develop concepts of team setting, team solving, substituted process paths, and supplemented process paths to expand our understanding of these issues. This will be demonstrated through two constructions for virtual teams: virtual platform and topos.

Media Ensembles and New Product Team Creativity

New product development (NPD) project members are increasingly dispersed across the globe. As a result, traditional face-to-face communication is often substituted and supplemented by more “virtual” media. A common concern is whether NPD teams that frequently use virtual media can be truly creative. In this chapter we attempt to explain why the creativity of some teams is above average, whereas others perform below the average. By using classification trees, we conduct an empirical study of the media ensembles employed by 46 teams involved in hi-tech NPD. We find that being above or below average cannot be explained by theories that focus on single media: the creative performance of NPD teams is a function of the media ensembles used. Some ensembles afford much higher probabilities for above-average creativity than others. These findings enrich theories of media choice and may provide managers with some ideas of how team creativity can be managed.

The Building Blocks for Creativity in Virtual Teams

As the popularity of virtual teams continues to rise, those who manage and are part of virtual teams must be aware of how to enhance the effectiveness of and foster creativity in virtual teams. To provide assistance, this chapter presents a model that outlines five building blocks for enhancing and supporting creative work in virtual teams. The five building blocks are—design, climate, resources, norms and protocols, and continual assessment. By building and maintaining each of the five building blocks discussed in this chapter, virtual teams may move to higher levels of creativity and ultimately success. The chapter begins with a review of the relevant literature, including prominent models of virtual team performance, and factors necessary for creativity in teams in general. The second section in the chapter describes the methodology that guided the current research from which the five building blocks model emerged. The third section of the chapter offers a detailed description of each of the five building blocks for creativity in virtual teams. Lastly, an integrative model is proposed which links the five building blocks back to the earlier discussed models of virtual team performance. The chapter closes with a discussion of the current research’s limitations and ideas for future researchers of virtual team creativity.

Creativity in Asynchronous Virtual Teams

Three related experiments, involving nearly 100 teams and 400 graduate students, found that virtual teams communicating strictly asynchronously produced significantly more creative results than did teams that engaged in some amount of synchronous communication (i.e., face-to-face or synchronous electronic communication). Using these experiments, four studies are conducted to explore creativity in the asynchronous virtual teams—each from a different aspect. Study one investigates individual team member personality, study two investigates team composition, while studies three and four investigate facets of team interaction. This chapter presents key findings from each study and synthesizes results across them. The analysis highlights the importance of team members, in terms of personality, as well as the composition of teams, in influencing interaction and the resultant creativity on a team level.

iCE

As it becomes increasingly important to work in new sociotechnological formations such as the virtual spaces across networks, so does the requirement to build new tools to furnish this emergent landscape. This chapter looks at the way a virtual space may be built and used to facilitate group, team and individual thinking in developing projects and also shaping practice in organizations where innovation is an important focus. The chapter describes the work being done to produce an interactive networked based ‘coinnovation’ environment (iCE); where members of an organization, individually and variously, may contribute their thoughts to help innovate—develop ‘prospects’—for the organization’s projects.

Rethinking Virtual Teams for Streamlined Development

Much of the research on creative teams tends to focus mainly on relatively small teams working in the fuzzy front-end of product development. In this chapter, we bring a complementary perspective from an industry context where creativity is often perceived as risky business—yet a precondition for success. Here, we focus closely on people and teams that might not usually describe their own work to be of a primarily ‘creative’ nature, and that currently work under circumstances where traditional approaches for enhancing creativity might no longer be applicable. Drawing from experiences in automotive and aerospace development, we argue that it is time to radically progress our current understanding of how creativity could be introduced in organizations where factors like legal demands and contractual agreements severely restrict ‘outside-the-box’ thinking, and where well-known creativity enablers such as trust, shared goals, and shared culture are becoming increasingly difficult to accomplish.