| Creative teams spanning disciplines, departments, organizational levels, and organizations are growing in use and impact. This research sought factors strongly associated with their success. Value engineering was selected as the focus for its 40 year, global, multi-industry history and its leader certification program. (Value engineering organizes ad hoc teams of 5 to 25 people representing relevant disciplines and stakeholders to invent or discover possible improvements to designs.); A questionnaire asked certified experts to select three of their studies and to rate each case on 77 items which were developed from the literatures of creativity, creative problem solving, and value engineering. Forty-three experts reported 128 cases from a variety of industries, predominantly product manufacturing and building construction. Because 30% of the associations were significant at p {dollar}{dollar}.3 selected the strongest 5% of the associations (all p {dollar}<{dollar}.001) for exploration.; Idea productivity seems to explain little of the success of these team efforts. Rather, insights, AHA's, and shifts in problem definition at the individual, team, and organizational level proved to be the key intervening variables between input factors and success.; The strongest influence on study impact and success was the openness of the client organization to ideas and change, but openness and acceptance seemed to be higher (not lower) when teams had more insights and shifts in problem definition. Selecting representative, well qualified teams and facilitating them with techniques such as function analysis and brainstorming seems to result in the required insight, AHA's, and shifts in problem definition. Studies which relied on idea productivity or on team member expertise without deliberate efforts to create new insights were less successful.; The results support using the subjective experiences of AHA's and insight to tap into the paradigm shifting, set breaking, frame breaking, and problem redefining aspects of the creative experience. Since shifts in assumptions and beliefs are also meaningful at the group and organizational level, such an approach seems promising for analyzing the creativity of organizations and other social systems. |
