Interdisciplinarity and Team Innovation: The Role of Team Experiential and Relational Resources

Interdisciplinary teams composed of members with different expertise possess a variety of perspectives, which increases their potential for innovation. In reality, team members often fail to integrate their expertise, resulting in the team not reaching its innovative potential. It is argued the unsharedness of expertise within interdisciplinary teams has an inverted-U relationship with innovation. To explore the conditions under which the unsharedness of expertise enhances or impairs innovation, the resource-based view of organizational productivity is applied to teams. It is argued the amount and configuration of team relational and experiential resources facilitate teams’ ability to integrate members’ expertise for innovation.