Systematic Design Methods and the Creative Performance of New Product Teams: Do They Contradict or Compliment Each Other?

In new product development, creative performance is of preeminent importance. Most NPD projects are executed with the NPD team as the organizational nucleus. As a result, managing creativity in NPD thus implies managing the creativity of NPD teams. Modern NPD projects therefore have the need for an approach that can be planned, optimized, and verified. In this article conceptual model is developed of the effect of modern design methodology on the creative performance of NPD teams. These principles affect NPD communication by, respectively, influencing the establishment of subgroups, the frequency of communication, the level of agreement or disagreement in the team, and the level of centralization of communication. These patterns of communication are then related to team-level creative performance through a set of regression analyses. The main conclusion of the article is that the design principles work together and need to be considered as an integrated whole: the creative performance of NPD teams can only effectively be managed by using and aligning all four of them.