Creativity and Innovation Management award for Kratzer, Leenders, and Van Engelen

Dr. Jan Kratzer, prof.dr. Roger Leenders, and prof.dr.ir. Jo Van Engelen of the Faculty have won the Tudor Rickards award for best paper in the journal Creativity and Innovation Management for the year 2006. Their winning paper is called 'Team Polarity and Creative Performance in Innovation Teams.' The award ceremony will be held at the world PDMA (Product Development and Management Association) conference in September.

'Team Polarity and Creative Performance in Innovation Teams.'

Creativity is essential for research and development efforts. Research and development endeavors are typically organized in teams. Unfortunately, little is known about how the team’s polarity or conflict potential affects the creativity of such teams.  

Based on a sample of 51 research and development teams (R&D teams), the study of Kratzer, Leenders, and Van Engelen examines the effects of polarity on team creativity and attemps to explore situational conditions under which conflict potential is detrimental or beneficial to R&D team creativity. The results show that in the conceptualization phase polarity positively influences the creative performance of R&D teams, whereas later in the development cycle (with lower degrees of complexity) polarity negatively impacts the creative performance of R&D teams.

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