More Innovation Together – But How?

An article from carl 03|2025

by Frank Frick

Interview with Marie Lena Heidingsfelder and Clemens Striebing from CeRRI at the Fraunhofer IAO. 

carl: Is the genius researcher and inventor, portrayed in an exaggerated form in Disney's Gyro Gearloose character, increasingly being replaced by research through teamwork?

Striebing: There may still be some researchers out there, who work like Gyro Gearloose. But teamwork in science is not shown enough appreciation. Last November, for example, the presentation of the Nobel Prize was reported in the press again. It all seems a bit antiquated, because good research is now actually only achieved through teamwork. A great example of this is the major research facility at CERN, where thousands of scientists performed experiments over many years to prove the existence of the Higgs particle – and, in the end, two theoreticians, who had predicted the particle, received the Nobel Prize. We regularly study the working climate in research organisations. Some of these organisations place strong emphasis on supporting outstanding researchers. These top researchers are sometimes given a large degree of freedom and means to successfully manage an institute or lead a team. But I think it’s difficult to ensure that an individual person will continuously produce innovations throughout their entire career. Personally, I get the impression that work tends to be more stable at institutions where management responsibility is distributed across several shoulders rather than just one or two.

Heidingsfelder:  I, on the other hand, am a firm believer in genius individuals. There is a lot of historical evidence of this. Some organisations in research and beyond rely on finding these people, and on these people remaining brilliant forever. But if organisations don’t want to rely on this, they would do well to invest in innovative teams. It’s easier to find people with the appropriate specialist skills, because, as individual people, they don’t have to be geniuses. Putting together innovative teams is therefore a more workable way for an organisation or company to yield innovations.

Striebing: I agree with that.

carl: What factors are crucial in ensuring that teams are successful and yield innovations?

Heidingsfelder: Teams achieve good innovative results if the technical skills of the team members overlap but are not congruent. You need an area in which everyone speaks the same language, but also areas in which one individual team member is the expert. On the other hand, if a team is expected to complete routine tasks like a well-oiled machine, the technical skills can also be congruent.

Striebing: It depends on the type of innovation you’re looking for. Are we talking about innovations that directly concern end customers? Is it a process innovation or a business model innovation? The rule of thumb is that the closer the innovation is to people, the more important the diversity of the team. And the type of diversity we’re talking about is also important. The influence of gender diversity has been well researched, but the results are unclear. Marie Heidingsfelder has also just mentioned the importance of specialist diversity. There are studies that show that the most important thing is for the individual team members to have experience in different specialist areas. And then there are also the results of the prominent Google study “Aristotle”. According to this, the most crucial thing for the success of a team is the method of collaboration rather than the composition of the team.
 

carl: Please tell us more about how a team should collaborate in order to be successful.
 

Striebing: The Google study shows that so-called participative security is crucial for successful teamwork. The members must feel valued within the group and be confident that they can express all their ideas freely without being mocked.

There are some very clear indications from research in this regard, which are also reflected in our organisational studies, such as in the Federal Criminal Police Office [1, 2, 3, 4]. On the one hand, the objective of the collaboration in the team or network should be clearly defined. The group members must know what they are working towards, and then they must also receive recognition when they achieve the objective. Secondly, the group members must also be able to make decisions and feel like they can influence the further course of the work. Thirdly, the employees must feel that they can actually contribute their skills. Of course, there are also factors that are detrimental to work in a team or network. For example, it’s problematic if individual members are cut off from information flows in the group.
 

carl: Is there a difference between the way teams that are made up of members from one organisation collaborate and the way interorganisational networks collaborate?

Heidingsfelder: In interorganisational networks, it is easier to ensure that the communication always remains professional and specialist. Of course, friendships can also develop in networks, but it is easier to draw the dividing line between private and professional than in teams whose members collaborate daily within one organisation. In addition, the employees in a network don’t all have the same managers. So a university professor, the CEO of a company and an employee from another company might have a meeting with each other, which is unaffected by any kind of hierarchical relationship. This means they can speak more openly with each other. At the same time, collaboration within an organisation or department is characterised by short distances and opportunities for spontaneous exchanges.
 

carl: Let's look at another aspect. Why is it increasingly important for groups of researchers to collaborate and for science and the business world to be closely networked?

Heidingsfelder: The more complex the challenge, the more we need collaborative solutions. Many current problems can no longer be resolved in a single scientific discipline or through science alone. To achieve results that are accepted in society, are economically usable and politically compatible, research must collaborate not only with the business world, but also with politics and society.
 

carl: When different project partners work together, we usually use the term cooperation. But you just spoke of collaboration. Why?

Heidingsfelder: The two terms – collaboration and cooperation – are hard to differentiate in everyday use. I prefer the term collaboration because it highlights the process of working together towards a common objective. For us, for example, this means that we involve citizens in innovations at an early stage, in the fields of health or mobility, for example, i.e. areas in which high technology affects the everyday life of a many different people.  

We also prefer to speak of collaboration, to indicate that we have a modern understanding of transfer processes [5, 6]. In innovation research, it was long assumed that prototypes with a high level of technological maturity were largely developed by scientists without any interaction with the business world or society, before then being transferred to companies that would develop it for mass production and sell it. Our collaborative approach, on the other hand, requires that science, the business world, politics and society collaborate.with each other already at a very early stage in the development of the technology.
 

carl: I get the impression that, for research funding, the state is increasingly focused on ensuring that science collaborates closely with economic and social actors. Do you share this impression?

Striebing: Yes. It’s pleasing that public sponsors, such as the Federal Ministry of Research, are increasingly attaching importance to the transfer of research results into practical application. Yet they often still have a traditional understanding of the transfer processes, and so they often ask applicants for commercialisation strategies. Scientists then have to describe how their long-term research will ultimately be used in practice. Companies only come into play when it comes to the exploitation of research. As Marie Heidingsfelder just said, we think it is more conducive to success if science and the business world collaborate together from the outset.

One particular difficulty is that companies often want exclusive rights to the results, which is not legally permissible with public funding. The challenge is to find ways to make publicly funded collaborations more appealing to the business world, without losing sight of the common good.
 

carl: What makes a collaboration between science and the business world successful?
 

Heidingsfelder: One success factor is the completion of solid, legal contracts at the start of the collaboration. Otherwise, questions of intellectual property and secrecy can later lead to discord.

A clear distribution of tasks is also important. Each partner should know exactly what they are contributing and what they want to achieve. And this should be done with transparency vis-à-vis the other partners. Personal trust between the partners is also really important. This is easier to build up in regional clusters than in clusters from widely scattered localities. A shared campus, places for informal meetings and shared events help to strengthen trust. And the loan or exchange of staff between the partners from the science and business worlds promotes trust and success.
 

carl: Does digitalisation not help to mitigate the disadvantages of cooperations across widely scattered localities?

Heidingsfelder: When using digital communication, you can try to ensure that you get to know each other better, make binding agreements and establish a relationship of trust. There are digital tools and exchange formats for this. In my experience, however, people collaborate better and find more spontaneous opportunities for collaboration if they are able to frequently meet in person.

Striebing: Some studies show that the quality of relationships with virtual contact can be just as good as with personal contact. But you have to invest enough time in maintaining the relationship. During the coronavirus pandemic, people in many offices got used to a very streamlined working method in which there were no longer just one or two face-to-face meetings in one working day, but five or six virtual meetings, sometimes even working through their lunch break. Now many organisations and companies are trying to entice employees back into the office, amongst other things so that they can encourage spontaneous, face-to-face communication. The absurd result: the people in the office don’t talk to each other, because they are too constrained by their overly tight schedules. I think that, with a more relaxed schedule, you can also establish a good personal basis for collaboration based on trust even through virtual means.
 

carl: How can you measure how successful and innovative a collaboration or network is?

Heidingsfelder: One way is to measure how many prototypes have been developed and to what level of technical maturity, how many start-ups have been founded and what added value has been created.

Striebing: These are the objective factors. Alongside that, there is the subjective assessment of those involved, which I sometimes even consider to be more meaningful. For example, questionnaires that tell us whether those involved feel like they have achieved more creative or more innovative results or an increase in efficiency as a result of the collaboration.

Heidingsfelder: Of course, it’s not possible to establish a control group: you can’t work through the same problem with the same actors once in a network and at the same time individually with every single actor. Yet it is my belief that the extent to which a problem can be solved collaboratively is dependent on the size and complexity of the question. For example, if application scenarios, political or legal framework conditions have to be taken into account, then it’s better to approach the problem in a network. On the other hand, there are problems that you can easily solve alone – and in that case, you shouldn’t attempt to solve them in a network.

carl: Ms. Heidingsfelder, Mr. Striebing, thank you for the interview.

[1] C. Striebing, 2022, Diversity and Discrimination in Research Organizations, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, 33-74, doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80117-956-020221002 
[2] C. Striebing, 2022, Diversity and Discrimination in Research Organizations, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, 75-129, doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80117-956-020221003 
[3] C. Striebing et al., 2019, Fraunhofer IAO, doi.org/10.24406/publica-fhg-299927 
[4] C. Striebing et al., 2023, Fraunhofer IAO, doi.org/10.24406/publica-1751
[5] F. Schütz et al., 2019, ScienceDirect, 5, 128-146, doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2019.04.002
[6] M. Heidingsfelder et al., 2019, The Design Journal 22, 723-735, doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2019.1603658

Image credits Studio Monbijou, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft e.V.