Tips For Effective Innovation Teams

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Laboratory human dynamics group is carrying out a major research topic: what team work style is the most innovative. Experts abandoned the traditional business school case analysis and sociologists' questionnaires. Instead, they used data mining to analyze the essence of innovation team through a large number of sensor data and complex mathematical models.

In the process of research, we need to collect team members. E-mail Communication records, smart phone data, and special sensor systems are used to analyze the process of each meeting by computer. Through these systems, we can fully understand the efficiency of each team member, collaborate with others, even including the tone of speech, mood pressure and so on, so as to conduct more in-depth research.

　　 Enhance the team's "group business"

Just as everyone's intelligence level can be tested through standardized IQ IQ test questions, MIT researchers have found that a team's ability to innovate and solve problems can also be tested through a standard test bank. In other words, as long as a team member participates in several simple test questions, it can systematically understand the comprehensive ability of a team and calculate a "Collective Intelligence" number. In the future, the "group business" value can predict the performance of the team in the unknown project.

The different innovation teams have different group merchants. The research further discovered the mystery of improving the League business: 1) the League merchants and each member's IQ level were not related; 2) however, through the analysis of sensor data worn by the members, it was found that if a few of the team members were too active, their speeches would occupy most of the communication time of the team, and the group merchants would drop abruptly; 3) the team members of the girls group were high.

Based on this, team communication and Brainstorming In the process, it is very important for team members to forget themselves (ego). The innovative leader of an enterprise should be instilled into the team from the very beginning: the ability of a team has little to do with personal intelligence. At the same time, leaders should ensure that employees can evenly distribute their speaking time in teams and avoid a small number of individuals taking part too much in order to truly improve meeting efficiency and group business.

　　 "Face to face" interaction

Some other findings in our research have been verified in reality. Like Montezemolo, chairman of Italy Ferrari company (Luca Cordero diMontezemolo) recently said that employees should send e-mails to colleagues less frequently. If problems need to be communicated, it is best to speak directly to the person. He thought this method was old-fashioned but "very effective". Act as YAHOO Marisa Meyer (Marissa Mayer), the latest leader of the company, is in the opposite direction. Today's information technology is so popular that it has abolished the loose rules that companies can work at home, requiring every employee to adhere to the company's office.

Ulam Tu Ya, a former senior public relations manager of the China Chamber of Commerce in the United States, has also written an article on "email's mystery and trap: corporate politics and organizational ecology", which once resonated in corporate circles, especially in multinational corporations. The article examines 4 major drawbacks of e-mail, including:

"Kick the ball and shift the ball to each other": e-mail has become a tool to shirk work and responsibility.

No matter how small, face to face or phone call, you must confirm the mail to you. This is no more than two purposes -- attack or defense.

"The following is the fate of the lords": it depends on the uniqueness of e-mail: passivity, which is very different from telephone communication.

"The mystery and trap of forwarding and secret sending": remember that forwarding is risky, and it is possible to promote the company's struggle on a large scale.

By analyzing the performance of different teams of a large IT company and their way of cooperation, we find that the most frequently used e-mail Teams show worse performance. By contrast, the secret weapon to create an innovative team is truly face-to-face communication. The experiment is to allow every team member to wear a special "e-Social" sensor every day, which can detect face to face communication. The results show that the more time the team members communicate face-to-face, the more frequent the team interaction, the more creativity they can improve.

This also confirms the idea of many innovative managers. For example, although the high speed Internet is so developed now, universities and research institutes insist that teachers and students and researchers can work together on campus to oppose traditional research and teaching process.