Product development team formation: effects of organizational- and product-related factors

Abstract

Although the performance of new product development (PD) is dependent on the structure and formation of design teams, effective configuration of the PD teams remains largely unexplored. According to social network research, teams are often organized in either closely connected or sparse structure. We conceptualize PD projects as collective problem-solving endeavors and develop a computational model of these projects where a number of designers conduct search over an NK(C) performance landscape. We group the designers in teams with closely connected or sparse structure. We also consider various organizational integration capabilities (i.e., coordinated operations, and common principles) as well as interaction networks among the teams (i.e., acyclical, cyclical, and modular). We use simulation and compare the design performance of teams with different configurations. Our results indicate that the extent by which organizations can effectively integrate design solutions determines the team structure and is likely to result in higher development performance. In addition, the design performance of strategies that employ both closely connected and sparse teams is contrasted with the strategies that use either of these structures. Regardless of the integration capabilities of the PD projects, strategies that simultaneously utilize both closely connected and sparse teams are likely to achieve higher development performance than strategies that only use teams with one particular structure.