Use Your Teams’ Cognitive Diversity for Creative Innovation

Most tech discussions these days revolve around new products and companies. The most innovative technological ideas often have a profound global impact, such as connecting people across borders and improving interactions and business efficiency. Companies are constantly working to develop the latest cutting-edge technology, but creative innovation does not begin by brainstorming or coming up with a great concept. It starts when a company builds and maintains a culture of ownership. This article at the Graduate School of Stanford Business by Sachin Waikar speaks about the benefits of cognitive diversity for creative innovation.

Goldberg’s View on Cognitive Diversity and Creative Innovation

Organizers have differing perspectives on a collaborative endeavor and demographic disparities, says Stanford Graduate School of Business associate professor Amir Goldberg. In Goldberg’s view, the presumption is that intellectual variety is beneficial for generating innovation and creative problem-solving but not always for efficient coordination.

To further understand this research, Goldberg and his colleagues Melissa Valentine and Katharina Lix of Stanford and Sameer Srivastava of Berkeley conducted collaborative research. They employed computational linguistics to chart how team members’ perspectives changed over time. With collaborated research, Goldberg discovered that the most successful teams adapted their cognitive diversity to their job.

Putting Diversity to an Advantage

Researchers collected information about the project online. Some of these projects are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, says Goldberg. Since many of Goldberg’s clientele are Fortune 500 firms, the stakes of team relationships are pretty high.

The research looked at over 800,000 communications sent by more than 400 individuals across 117 teams.

Cognitive diversity was not a predictor of performance over time for a team. However, higher diversity in the ideation stage and lower diversity in the coordination stage led to better project delivery time frames.

The author further shares some great lessons for team leaders.

To read the original article, click on https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/think-different-sometimes-teams-succeed-when-they-balance-creativity-focus

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