Innovative Open Spaces Impact on New Product Development Teams

It is a new trend in knowledge-based industries to pay attention to the physical and social aspects of their office. Workspaces for new product development (NPD) teams are meant to support creativity and innovation (Coradi et al., 2015). Our research objective is to further explore the relationship between project teams and their workspaces. Indeed ""As leaders consider their workspace needs, they should be informed of workspace fads versus workspace intent"" (Blakey, 2015, p. 107).Certain characteristics of a space stand out as having significant impact: the modularity of elements that make up meeting rooms and individual workspaces, the possibility of transforming spaces according to needs and work styles, and the connectivity and intelligence of spaces (Vischer, 2008). Employees are also affected by density, the proximity of team colleagues, privacy and control over one's environment. Kristensen (2004) concludes that spaces affect individuals' well-being, impact channels of communication and the availability of knowledge tools, and influence coherence and continuity. McElroy and Morrow (2010) argue that changing a workplace layout can have a number of positive impacts. It can nurture lateral relationships among individuals on the same team or different teams, which in turn fosters innovation and creativity. To summarize, the literature points to positive effects between the physical and architectural characteristics of the space dedicated to project teams. Part of this influence is supposed to come from the impact on communication and collaboration (aggregated to team integration) between members and sub-teams, which improves their creativity and effectiveness. We report here the results of survey of ten teams in the same companie but different locations. The tested model includes two dependent variables: team creativity and effectiveness and a mediating variable: team integration. The independent variables are space variety, interior environment quality, satisfaction with large meeting room, project commitment, IT environment, workstation. Control variable is team size. The Cronbach's alpha are good ranging from 74.1 to 87.6. Our main results support the literature: the impact of innovative spaces on the efficiency and creativity of teams go through their effect on integration (measured by collaboration and communication).