Diverse Teams
Now we know that teams are incredibly important to fostering innovation in the workplace. But what happens if all of the people are coming from the same department or have a similar background? What if we have a bunch of marketers in a room? Or a group of sales people? Are we going to get a range of ideas and perspectives? Or just ones suited to a particular sector?
The likelihood is that the ideas will be geared toward what they know. This is why having diverse teams is incredibly important.
Having teams made up of employees in different positions, from differing cultures, from diverse backgrounds and experiences will enrich the ideas and innovation. People from varying backgrounds are going to have different insights into why an idea may or may not work and that is crucial in developing those multi-billion dollar ideas.
Extra Information
Innovation is a team sport ...
When we think back to some of the greatest inventions or innovations the world has seen, it would appear that they happened in isolation — that one genius came up with an idea all on their own. But Janet Rae-Dupree, a columnist for the New York Times found research that is in fact, contradictory.
She wrote about a researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri — Keith Sawyer — who noted that innovation is no longer taking place in a bubble, but rather is happening in what he has termed “group genius.” He researched a scientific method he calls interaction of the analysis of the study of creativity.
Here is what he found:
By studying verbal cues, body language and incremental adjustments during team innovation efforts, Sawyer was able to determine that what we perceive as a sudden glimpse or flash of insight is instead something that has been evolving in social interactions over a period of time.
So creativity is not something that occurs spontaneously in isolation. It is a group thought that has evolved and taken shape through interaction and conversation.
Rae-Dupree also noted that others, such as Ed Catmull, President of Pixar Animation Studios and Disney Animation Studios, have discovered that “collective creativity” involves large groups of people from various disciplines working cohesively to solve problems.
In fact, his belief is that every single level of artistic and technical sectors of a business must be working collaboratively in order to achieve innovation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/business/worldbusiness/07iht-innovate.1.18456109.html