A social network perspective on the management of product development programs

Creativity is essential to the performance of product development programs (PDPs). Most PDPs are designed around teams that jointly work together according to the product decomposition into components, the design and development procedure, and the methods of the final integration. Since the creative product development task requires the teams to combine and integrate input from multiple other teams, the team's structure of interaction is an important determinant of their creativity. In research and practice, however, little is known about the social networks of the teams and their creativity within PDPs. In this study we investigate different structural aspects of social networks of such teams and their creativity within two multinational PDPs. The main results of our investigation imply that many direct network contacts around a weekly intensity stimulate the creativity of teams of PDPs, whereas very open networks with a high information variety minimizes the team's creativity.