Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-1-2014
Abstract
Innovation is critical for establishing and maintaining competitive advantage for today's organizations. The majority of organizational innovation occurs within teams established for the specific purpose of creating novel products and services. Innovation team research to date has focused largely on top-level management teams instead of on the teams within the organization charged with the task of innovating. As organization leaders seek better ways to initiate, develop and sustain innovation capabilities within their organizations, research on such teams has grown. To date this research has attended to elements of creative, learning and other knowledge creation processes. In contrast, relatively little attention has been directed toward understanding interpersonal dynamics within those processes. This research adds to innovation team research by examining interpersonal learning and creativity dynamics that occur within successful innovation teams. Our findings suggest that successful innovation teams, regardless of team type, and organizational context, engage and participate in an emergent collective experience of deep play when they successfully innovate. A deeper analysis of deep play shows that it may be driven by several factors: an ability to emergently articulate new team norms, roles, rules and processes in a protected environment, and participant purpose and passion in congruence with innovation team mission. Further, this deep play is at the heart of the dynamic learning and creativity by which new ideas and solutions required for innovation are born and developed.
Keywords
organizational resilience, management, Weatherhead School of Management, organization innovation, innovation teams, emergence, team ecology, learning, play, deep play
Rights
© The Author(s). This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Department/Center
Design & Innovation
Recommended Citation
Piotrowski, Suzanne, "Playing To Win: Dynamics of Teams That Innovate" (2014). Student Scholarship. 338.
https://commons.case.edu/studentworks/338
