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Online Communication for Team Creativity in Tech Companies: Barriers and Tool Design

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Cross-Cultural Design. Applications in Business, Communication, Health, Well-being, and Inclusiveness (HCII 2022)

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Abstract

Teams in tech companies collaboratively solve creative problems, and this team creative process increasingly occurs online. Despite many innovative tool designs to support collaborative creativity, many teams did not adopt them. This study aimed to identify the barriers to adoption and teams’ needs for collaborative creativity support. We clarified the team creative process in practice by individual in-depth interviews with 15 employees in 12 different high-tech companies in China. The results suggested that the teams frequently shared information via communication tools or face to face, and many of them acknowledged the benefits of collaboration in team creativity. However, most of them ideated and evaluated ideas or solutions individually. The reasons for the low collaboration level included the features of their tasks, a lack of technical and managerial support for collaboration in the ideation and evaluation phase, and a lack of motivation for team creativity. Based on these findings, we outlined implications for designing tools to support team creativity and demonstrated a prototype of a communication tool with creative support features.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, 200237, China

    Yue Chen

  2. Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Man Wu & Qin Gao

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  1. Yue Chen
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  2. Man Wu
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  3. Qin Gao
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Correspondence to Qin Gao .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Pei-Luen Patrick Rau

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Chen, Y., Wu, M., Gao, Q. (2022). Online Communication for Team Creativity in Tech Companies: Barriers and Tool Design. In: Rau, PL.P. (eds) Cross-Cultural Design. Applications in Business, Communication, Health, Well-being, and Inclusiveness. HCII 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13313. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06050-2_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06050-2_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-06049-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-06050-2

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