Virtual Teams in Practice: Tales from the Battlefront of the Fuzzy Front End of the Innovation Process

Abstract

A growing number of enterprises are building virtual teams to assist in crafting new opportunities in the fuzzy front end of the innovation process. Using the tools of design thinking, these creative virtual teams have different management requirements than virtual teams used in the more routine efforts of product development. This chapter uses examples from industry to examine the challenges of managing customer expectations, explore the membership dynamics of virtual teams, and suggest a new framework for assessing the progress of creative virtual teams, concept maturity. An example from the creative virtual team at Synaptics, the Red Dot Award winning Onyx mobile phone concept, is used to delve deeper into these concepts. Finally, trends for the diffusion of creative virtual teams as well as potential challenges in bringing such teams into your organization are investigated.