The creativity of virtual design teams: an exploratory case study

Creativity is a topic of interest across numerous disciplines and areas of study. While in engineering design some stages of the design process have become highly dependent upon technology and Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools, scholars in the field of management claim that the impetus for virtual teamwork calls for research as to how the new, boundaryless virtual arrangements alter some of the management practices built surrounding the physically-collocated workplace. In this paper, we reveal a knowledge gap on how creativity is influenced in the virtual design context. In our quest to start bridging this gap, we pursued an exploratory case study with a student-based virtual design team project, known as the European Global Project Realization (EGPR). Thirty-nine interview extracts from most participants in the EGPR provided us with insights into the nature of the project, the participants’ perceptions of creativity, and their experience of designing in virtual teams. The qualitative data collected from these interviews were triangulated by observation and document review and were analysed thematically, in line with our theoretical model derived from the literature review. In all, our study contributes to the current body of knowledge by identifying some of the factors that influence creativity in virtual design teams (i.e. motivation, experience/training, subgrouping, diversity and knowledge, supervision, industrial partners, project importance, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)).