Designing Innovation: Prototypes and Team Performance in Design Thinking

This study investigates design thinking innovation teams working on three different innovation tasks: business model innovation, service innovation, and product innovation. Each task involves the generation of many prototypes, one of which needs to be selected as the final prototype. Further, one of the teams collaborated through virtual collaboration. By measuring both subjective and objective performances of the teams, we compared the different innovation tasks and their impact on design thinking teams. Our preliminary study shows that while the generation of many prototypes indeed seems to support the selection of the best final prototype, it is mostly the team process which impacts the quantity of all and quality of the final prototype. Especially the virtually cooperating team working on a service innovation task, experienced major difficulties in the process, while we can report that the business model innovation team generated the most prototypes while working in a rather harmonious team.