Multidisciplinary Teams Achieving Innovations and Client Satisfaction through Design Thinking
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Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
School of Business |
Master's thesis
Authors
Date
2019
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
International Design Business Management
Language
en
Pages
130+9
Series
Abstract
Management and development of digital services is becoming increasingly complex. Therefore, companies are outsourcing these activities or purchase services to improve the coordination of the services in-house. As the aforementioned requests and needs are becoming more demanding, companies that are offering consultancy in these services need to ensure that their employees have the tools for coordinating their work and specific tasks. At the same time knowledge and amount of information in specific fields of digital services are increasing as well. This is why more and more companies are establishing teams where team members have expertise in certain disciplines. However, as these team members are then collaborating across different disciplines in order to deliver a full experience or a diverse pool of services, a better understanding of coordinating this multidisciplinary work is needed. The theoretical framework of this thesis builds on a research in multidisciplinary collaboration, especially in the context where multidisciplinary teams aim at achieving innovations and client satisfaction. Furthermore, design thinking is studied as a potential strategy for improving the successfulness of multidisciplinary team work in achieving innovations and client satisfaction. This thesis adopts a case study in which 9 employees of a Finnish digital marketing consultancy company were interviewed. The empirical data was collected through semi-structured interviews and observations. Data collection continued until theoretical saturation was ensured. This data was analyzed by using the Gioia method which offers a systematic way to analyze qualitative data. The findings of this thesis offer insights on the coordination of multidisciplinary collaboration, the role of this collaboration in innovations and client satisfaction as well as the impact of design thinking in the aforementioned processes. First, when multidisciplinary teams are established these teams need to overcome challenges such as problems in communication, increased need of time for collaboration and coordination of common goals. Second, multidisciplinary teams should organize time for brainstorm- ing, sharing of best practices and mentoring that support achieving innovations and client satisfaction. Third, my findings show that design thinking can work as an overall strategy that supports the formation of multidisciplinary teams, coordinating innovation processes and serving clients in a way that increases their level of satisfaction. This thesis shares concrete tools and mindsets that can support the work of multidisciplinary teams in achieving innovations and higher level of client satisfaction. It also offers managerial implications in order to guide company managers in implementing the tools and mindsets that are introduced in this thesis. As a most important one is design thinking, that can help companies to differentiate in the com- petition through unique ways to approach and solve problems in multidisciplinary team work.Description
Thesis advisor
Nordbäck, EmmaKeywords
multidisciplinary teams, multidisciplinary collaboration, innovations, client satisfaction, design thinking