Cultural factors influencing creativity in product development: an exploratory study

One of the challenges that influences all steps toward innovation is creativity. Human creativity is influenced by various factors, some of which fall into the category of culture. The primary goal of this contribution is to design an exploratory study that enables an initial observation and collection of parts of these influencing factors based on an existing impact model. A preliminary study with two parts, one for the participants’ own perspective and one for the participants’ observations of multicultural teamwork, is carried out, followed by the main study focusing on the influencing factors and barriers of culture on creativity in distributed product development teams. The results are analyzed in detail, largely confirming prior findings in the literature while also showing potential additional connections among the influencing factors. The results are used to further develop an impact model, confirming the relevance of cultural influencing factors on creativity and the need to perform further research to understand the influencing factors and their connections better.