New organizational designs for promoting creativity: A case study of virtual teams with anonymity and structured interactions

Companies organize teams to enhance creativity and innovation. Creativity refers to the generation of new and novel ideas, whereas innovation encompasses both idea generation and the commercialization of these ideas to add value to the enterprises. Standard teams are those, wherein participants meet face-to-face to develop new ideas and/or to commercialize them. Asynchronous virtual teams are those which allow participants to interact via digital means without face-to-face meetings. Asynchronous virtual teams are especially convenient for participants at global locations.The objective of this paper is to outline a third kind of teams, the virtual teams with anonymity and structured interactions (VTASIs), in which participants remain anonymous, follow a modified Delphi brainstorming process, communicate with one another asynchronously via electronic means, apply a set of streamlined idea generation strategies (the Combinatorial Heuristic and Normatively Generic Method), and conduct multiple rounds of structured interactions under the guidance of a knowledgeable team leader. Individual team member works alone, yet interacts indirectly with all others in a group setting.After having briefly reviewed the factors that are known to constraint the performance of both the standard and asynchronous virtual teams, this paper describes a study conducted in Spring 2009 Semester at University at Buffalo, involving eight VTASI teams of a total of 72 graduate engineering students who worked on generating new ideas for improving four specific projects. Key results are discussed.For global operations, the asynchronous virtual teams represent an improvement over the standard teams in terms of reach, costs, and execution. The VTASI teams advocated in this paper represent yet a further improvement over the Asynchronous virtual teams, and hold promise to be the most effective among the three types of teams in promoting creativity.