CREATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF IDEAS IN GLOBAL COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENTS

We presently see that new proactive and collaborative ideation practices are becoming more common in many large organizations, facilitated and supported by new IT-based collaboration tools, e.g. in terms of platforms for fast and simple sharing of information and data, social media, and dedicated tools for capturing and managing ideas for innovation. This development opens up vast new opportunities for collaborative ideation and innovation, but at the same time brings about challenges to management, as it takes these creative activities to a new level of complexity. This new approach to ideation encompasses distributed way of working and while previous work has investigated the potential effects of increased heterogeneity during idea creation and development in teams and groups, little is still known about how heterogeneity influences ideation performance during idea development in virtual collaborations. This paper explores the relationship between ideation and different types of heterogeneity in large multi-national companies. More specifically the aim of this paper is to investigate the potential influence of functional and geographical heterogeneity during idea development in virtual distributed settings. Our study shows that a single source of heterogeneity (geographical or functional) supports new idea development in a distributed work setting, but when controlling for their interaction ideation performance decreases.