Multicultural issues of product development education in virtual teams

• Autores: Vanja Čok, Nuša Fain, Nikola Vukašinović, Roman Zavbi
• Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 31, no. Extra 3, 2015 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Innovative Methods of Teaching Engineering), págs. 863-873
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Project oriented courses became a global trend among best engineering universities around the world in the past decade.They teach students not only core academic knowledge, but face students with real problem solving situations, where theyneed to express and develop their other virtues and skills, e.g. working in multidisciplinary teams, time and taskmanagement, problem solving, different presentation and communication skills, etc.In this paper we investigate (multi-) cultural background of virtual team members from two different aspects: how itinfluences the team’s creativity and how various cultural backgrounds of creative team members could lead into differentperceptions of particular design features. Multi-cultural background of NPD teams is a complex challenge, which—if notaddressed properly—could cause multi-level problems. The results of our first described research clearly indicate how thesedifferences could affectthe formingof virtual NPD creative teams and suggestguidelines howto build effective NPDteams.The second research shows that the same design features can trigger different responses in different cultural background.The designers, who design a product for a particular market, should be aware of these differences, which must be addressedwith a special care if we want the product to be properly accepted at the desired target of a global market.