Design good, business bad: factors that contribute to success for multi-disciplinary innoversity team projects

According to the Cox Report (2005) the UK has a strong history of innovative design but is poor at transferring those skills into a viable business. Eight multi-disciplinary teams, made up of 36 individuals attending a post graduate course in Creative Economy at Kingston University, participated in a study to see if there was a relationship between various psychological factors and the success of innovative business projects run under the Young Enterprise scheme. The marks achieved at the completion of the Masters course were analysed to see if there were correlations with the participants' reflections about the course in blogs, and their scores in the following questionnaires: Big Five factor personality, Zimbardo time perspective and the Kolb learning styles, both as an individual and as part of a team. Individuals that achieved higher marks in the course had higher extroversion scores, higher future time perspective scores and lower present fatalistic scores. Factors that increased team success included a smaller number of members, relatively homogeneous mix of professional backgrounds, and more members with English as a first language. As only eight teams were studied, future research is needed to confirm if these findings are an accurate reflection as to how multi-disciplinary teams can become successful in creating innovative design and successful businesses.