VOIS - Area 2 - Module 1

  1. MODULE TITLE

Module 1: Building the ability to work with people from different communities, disciplines, and functions
  1. AUTHORS

Michael Wildt, Sandra Hogeforster, Anna-Maria Czarny, Christian Wildt
  1. SHORT DESCRIPTION

Open innovation requires working with people from outside of your organization. Often these people come from different cultures, backgrounds, and communities. Working with such diverse teams is a crucial component for success in innovative teams. To prevent diverse backgrounds to be an obstacle, certain aspects must be considered.

After reading this module the reader will receive an overview of different aspects of cultures, how to work with them, and use diversity as an advantage. In addition, different psychological concepts will be explained that facilitate working in teams and reaching the maximum potential of each co-worker. Certain features of your organizational structure will be questioned. To ensure the success of any open innovation strategy with workers from outside of your company cross-functional teams have to be built and work well together. Lastly, setting the right goals and the right long or short-term focus must be thought through when applying any innovation strategy. Especially when it comes to open innovation strategies supervisors must be ready for new perspectives. The ability to work with people from different communities, disciplines, and functions can be learned or enhanced and is the fundament of any open innovation strategy.
  1. LEARNING OBJECTIVES

    Upon completing this module, you should be able to:

  • A general understanding of the concept of culture and how to treat other cultures.
  • How to create cultural synergy
  • Which way is the best to build and work with a cross-functional team
  • How can SMEs cooperate with large companies or Universities
  • How to benefit from multiple people working on a project and when a group starts to work inefficiently
  • How to set goals that will increase the performance of a team without creating pressure and causing distress among team members.
  1. Training Content
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Challenge three – Creating a Cross-Functional Team

Source: https://www.pexels.com/de-de/foto/foto-von-leuten-die-einander-die-hande-halten-3184423/

Fabian is working at a medium-sized agricultural company. Apart from his other tasks, he now should oversee a new project with the aim of reducing the number of pesticides that are being used on crops. For this purpose, the company hires external experts from different fields. Different suggestions are being made from using genetically altered plants or keeping other insects that are the natural enemies of pests or improving the soil. Fabian informed himself on how to work in a team with experts from different fields and made it very clear to all of them what the final result should look like.

But later, he has many other tasks going on and he is not overseeing the progress. The experts work at different paces and sometimes disregard each other’s suggestions because they contradict knowledge from their own field. In the end, no clear action plan what do to has been formulated instead many different ideas are presented that don’t complement each other. The company is unhappy because it can’t fund all ideas and therefore has wasted resources on experts whose suggestions can’t be used.

After the successful setup of the team, what could Fabian have done differently to ensure well-functioning cooperation?

Instead, Fabian should have ensured that different milestones are reached, and everyone is on the same page. Also, the working environment should be designed in a way that the experts can speak out if they think an idea of a different team member contradicts their own ideas. In that case, the chances of formulating one consistent fundable action plan would have been higher.

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