diversity

Researchers and decision-makers in global logistics are constantly communicating and co-operating across disciplinary and cultural borders. Therefore, doctoral candidates in logistics need to learn and practice skills to cope with multi-dimensional diversity in their working environment. We present a dynamically evolving structured doctoral training programme offered to early stage researchers who are affiliated with the International Graduate School for Dynamics in Logistics in the Research Cluster LogDynamics at the University of Bremen.

The ongoing demographic change leads to an increasing lack of highly skilled workforce which affects especially R&D driven organizations. In order to counter this effect, organizations tend to cooperate and form alliances and networks. This way they can pool their resources in interorganizational teams and gain access to complementary skills. On a micro level, the success of cooperations thus strongly depends on the success of the respective interorganizational teams. While traditional diversity research focuses on benefits and risks of heterogeneous teams within one organization, interorganizational teams are faced with additional challenges regarding diversity. In order to identify management issues and to gain a comprehensive overview of the relevant diversity dimensions and their complex interactions, we explore different perspectives on interorganizational R&D teams and integrate them into a framework for further research.

Through their diversity of competences and knowledge, heterogeneous new product development teams have a high potential for innovativeness. On the one hand, team diversity helps to deal with complex tasks and to improve the development of new products. On the other hand, a high level of diversity can lead to communication and cooperation barriers within the team, obstructing teamwork and hence hindering creativity and innovativeness. Therefore, finding the right constellation in this conflict between diversity and communication - exploiting the benefits whilst avoiding the hindrances - contributes to helping develop the full potential for innovation. This paper describes the different influences of diversity on the innovativeness of NPD teams and gives practical implications for managing heterogeneous teams.