ABSTRACT
Empirical studies show seemingly contradictory forces of team diversity on innovation. Diversity can act either as a driver or as an inhibitor for innovation. There is also evidence of a dynamic change of those diversity effects. However, empirical studies cannot entirely capture the effects of diversity on innovation. An ever-changing and highly competitive marketplace and shorter product life cycles force companies to be more innovative and to develop new and improved existing products, technologies, and services continually and fast. Many organizations seek to achieve this with cross-functional new product development teams (NPD teams) since they hope to improve creativity and innovation with such teams. NPD teams can be viewed as complex adaptive systems with individuals as operating agents and performance variables as emergent phenomena. There are a few agent-based models of heterogeneous teams and the effects on team work, which show the effect of information processing and diversity in a generic agent-based model.
