Organizing for creativity, quality and speed in product creation processes

Current research in industrial engineering and management sciences shows that organizational architectures are of critical importance for a better performance of product creation processes in terms of creativity, quality and speed. For many companies, streamlining those processes - including engineering - is of vital importance for their survival in a global and turbulent marketplace. However, the most commonly used solution - the matrix structure - does not support this effort sufficiently. Based on diagnoses of both problems and solutions in 11 industrial companies in the Netherlands and the United States, a new configuration emerged: an organizational arrangement consisting of several temporary team network organizations, one for each product creation project, to be drawn from a sustainable pool of professionals representing multiple competencies. This novel, dynamic organizational architecture is clarified in terms of its opportunities for improved creativity, quality and speed, using chaordic systems thinking as a lens.