Management 12th Edition by Ricky W. Griffin page 608 case questions 2. Explain t

Question

Management 12th Edition by Ricky W. Griffin

page 608 case questions

2. Explain the advantages and disadvantages of open innovation and multidisciplinary collaboration in terms of team cohesion. What aspects of such teams, for example, may increase cohesiveness? Which aspects may reduce cohesiveness?

CASE:

In 2006, a well-known multinational company hired an innovation consulting firm called NineSigma to draw up a request for proposal (RFP) entitled “Nanoparticle Halide Salt: Formulation and Delivery.” According to NineSigma CEO Andy Zynga, providing an RFP means “crafting a very precise written needs statement for vetted solution providers who have known expertise in specific areas.” In this case, the client was in the market for a chemically designed salt with specific properties—a compound for which its own R&D department didn’t have the necessary expertise. So NineSigma, reports Zynga, “marketed” its RFP “to a broad audience of technical experts. Proposals came in from a variety of industries and organization types, including energy and fuels, pharma, and engineering services.” The winning proposal was submitted by a team of orthopedics researchers who had created nanoparticles of salt for studies of osteoporosis.

And that’s how PepsiCo developed a way to reduce the sodium content of Lay’s Classic potato chips without sacrificing the flavor that consumers were used to. This approach to an expanded search for solutions is sometimes called open innovation, which Zynga defines as “the process of reaching beyond your team, company, or industry for technologies, solutions, ideas, and knowledge available through global solution-provider networks. … The rationale,” he explains, “is that partnering with outside innovators may lead to something even better and will undoubtedly accelerate the process if a more advanced solution exists elsewhere.”

In a very real sense, although it’s a “process of reaching beyond your team,” open innovation is also an extension of the principle of building teams with a greater diversity of input.* David Feitler, senior program manager at NineSigma, points to a parallel between team building as a means of breaking down internal barriers to problem solving and open innovation as a means of breaking down external barriers. Feitler explains that another NineSigma client, the Dutch-based multinational paint manufacturer AzkoNobel, was already practicing open innovation as a means of breaching external barriers when it approached NineSigma about improving internal collaboration. The company was divided into 11 autonomous divisions, and it had grown mainly by means of acquisition. As a result, says Feitler, it “had the typical silos, with organizational and geographical boundaries inhibiting the diffusion of knowledge.

“The solution,” he reports,

was to implement the request for proposal process inside the organization, broadly training large numbers of technical staff in the process and more intensively training a core group of “Internal Program Managers” to provide the coaching and guidance required for a wellspecified search [for collaborative ideas].

Two years later, adds Feitler, AzkoNobel had developed a process of assembling “ad hoc SWAT teams” which allows “individuals with challenging problems … to tap into a system that gives them rapid access to colleagues in other divisions and countries.”

The idea of “ad hoc SWAT teams,” argues Feitler, is consistent with the findings of studies on the role of so called cross-pollination—the recombination of previously unrelated ideas—in the diffusion of innovation. In particular, Feitler cites research led by Harvard University’s Lee Fleming, who culled data from every U.S. patent granted since 1975. What did Fleming and his team want to find out from all of this data? First, they wanted to know what kind of networks among inventors and researchers had been developed to foster significant cross-pollination. Second, they were interested in how different networks contribute to “creativity,” which is commonly defined as the combining of familiar ideas in unexpected ways.

Fleming’s team identified two different network models that tend to result in “novel combinations”: (1) the broker, which revolves around an influential person who’s connected to many other people who don’t know each other; and (2) the connector, which revolves around an influential person who often introduces his collaborators to each other. The researchers found that organizations functioning as brokers were more likely to generate new ideas because they occupied a central position through which information and ideas travel. By the same token, brokers typically found it harder than connectors to get their ideas publicized.

Some related research goes into more practical detail. Gratton and Erickson, for instance, found that cross-pollination “almost always requires the input and expertise of people with disparate views and backgrounds.” In other words, diversity of expertise and experience is critical, but Gratton and Erickson also concluded that it can “inhibit collaboration”: “Diversity,” they observe,

often means that team members are working with people that they know only superficially or have never met before— colleagues drawn from other divisions of the company, perhaps, or even from outside it. We have found that the higher the proportion of strangers on the team and the greater the diversity of background and experience, the less likely the team members are to share knowledge or exhibit other collaborative behaviors

In turn, these findings are consistent with Fleming’s conclusion that “the evidence linking breakthroughs with multidisciplinary collaborations remains mixed. On average,” advises Fleming, “it’s more productive to search within established disciplines. Or, when trying to cross-pollinate between fields, the more appropriate approach is to combine areas that have some common ground.” Fleming limits the term “breakthrough” to those “very, very few” inventions or innovations that ultimately produce the highest level of value. Thus when it comes to diversity or “multidisciplinary collaboration,” the issue is whether “the divergence between collaborators’ fields of expertise” is more or less likely to yield a breakthrough. In this respect, the results were in fact mixed. Fleming found, for example, that the greater this divergence, “the lower the overall quality” of a team’s output. At the same time, however, outputs will vary more widely from useless to extremely valuable, thus making breakthroughs more likely.

Finally, let’s go back to NineSigma’s Andy Zynga, who attributes the impasse faced by PepsiCo’s internal problem solvers to a “cognitive bias” that psychologists call functional fixedness. “Any five-year-old,” observes Zynga, “has no trouble turning an old blanket and a couple of chairs into an impenetrable fort. But as we get older, knowledge and experience increasingly displace imagination and our ability to see an object for anything other than its original purpose.”

Adult-run organizations, Zynga argues, encounter functional fixedness on a much more complex level: “Technologists, engineers, and designers,” he says, “not only have their own expertise, they have their own way of applying their expertise. Ironically, the more success they’ve had with their approach to a solution, the harder it is to imagine a different one.” As Zynga sees it, open innovation “replicates the process that a five-year-old goes through to see the potential of a fort in a couple of chairs and a blanket.” It’s all a matter of making connections between what you want to create and objects— or ideas—that apparently have unrelated applications. “Open innovation practitioners,” explains Zynga, “source solutions to specific problems in [an analogous] way—by enabling a connection between a need and potential solutions that reside in unrelated industries.”

Explanation / Answer

The primary advantage of open innovation and multidisciplinary collaboration in terms of team cohesion is that diversity of input is increased substantially as problem solving becomes more dynamic in such a scenario. The reason why problem solving becomes more dynamic is that all internal barriers are broken in case of open innovation and multidisciplinary collaboration. Also multidisciplinary collaboration leads to destruction of organizational silos and this result in increased level of team cohesion. In terms of disadvantages such a method can inhibit or reduce collaboration. This is because with an attempt to form multidisciplinary collaboration firms seek diversity and under such an approach team members interact with other individuals whom they do not know properly and only know on a superficial level. This prevents the team members from sharing knowledge in a meaningful manner.

Cohesiveness may be increased by focusing on aspects like imagination and ability to think out of the box. When team members are imaginative they will embrace diversity and will share knowledge in a manner that is meaningful. Aspects that reduce cohesiveness are too much focus on knowledge and experience that may lead to functional fixedness.

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