IMPROVING CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING AND SPARKING CREATIVITY THROUGH THE APPLICATION OF THE CULTURAL SYNERGY SPECTRUM METHOD

Product engineers need creativity to come up with solutions that have high innovative potential. Today product development often takes place in these distributed settings, making tasks that involve creativity more critical. With the distributed settings come oftentimes also intercultural teams, since talent is recruited from all over the world. To support such intercultural distributed product development teams with their creative tasks, the Cultural Synergy Spectrum (CSS) method has been designed. This contribution aims at validation the method’s support performance and applicability through application in an intercultural team in a live-lab environment. Three teams composed of engineers from different fields in an international university program worked on solving the practice problem.