Factors influencing creativity in virtual design teams

Creativity is an important facet of engineering design, and its significance seems to have increased as organizations move to more virtual working arrangements and are faced with competitiveness in a global, ‘boundaryless’ arena. As organizations ‘go virtual’, researchers and practitioners from various disciplines have begun to center their attention on the creativity of their people, teams, and organizations in these new working environments. A cross-disciplinary literature review on creativity, design, and virtual teams posited a knowledge gap surrounding creativity in Virtual Design Teams (VDTs). More specifically, it is still unknown whether the unique characteristics of VDTs can enable creativity as it happens in traditional, physically-collocated design teams. In view of this, two qualitative studies have been conducted and one is underway. The first study drew from student designers and unpacked a number of enhancers of and inhibitors to VDT creativity based on the designers’ perceptions. The second study, again student-based, sought to identify creativity enhancers/inhibitors following a different methodological approach; that of observation. Analysis of these findings has yet to be completed. The third study will be comparative between a traditional design team and a VDT, and will be conducted in an industrial VDT context in order to produce findings that will be closer and more applicable to industrial reality.