MODULE TITLE

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

AUTHORS

Michael Wildt, Sandra Hogeforster, Anna-Maria Czarny, Christian Wildt

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.

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.

Training Content

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Cooperation between SMEs and Universities

Collaboration between SMEs and universities can offer many wins for both sides:

It serves as a guide for the development of new technologies and innovations.
It Aids in the Recruitment of new academic hires
It combines theory with evidence.
It establishes a consistent talent pipeline.
It guides and mentors young data storytellers.

Source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/strict-female-teacher-with-book-pointing-at-scribbled-blackboard-3771074/

Relationships between universities and SMEs frequently fall short of expectations, especially when projects are focused on pre-competitive R&D (Bertello et al., 2022).

Therefore, certain obstacles must be considered. These are the main challenges in the four phases: initiation and planning phase, execution phase, closing phase, and monitoring and control phase.

The key problems in the beginning and planning phase include a lack of firm-level innovation strategy and partner mapping, as well as goal inconsistency and the existence of unknown partners at the project level. Therefore, the SME has to be clear in its goals and what the potential partner should look like.
Inadequate information systems, time pressure, and a lack of resources at the company level, as well as goal redefinition, underestimating of partners’ efforts, and numerosity and heterogeneity at the project level, are important impediments in the project execution phase. Therefore, the partners have to be flexible, considerate and realistic in their expectations when working with each other.
Finally, the most recurrent impediments in the transversal phase of monitoring and control are ineffective management control systems at the company level and project-level bureaucracy (Bertello et al., 2022). To overcome this issue the organizational level should be kept as simple as possible.

When all the above points are considered during the planning and implementation of the project the collaboration between universities and SMEs can thrive.