1. Management Cases Q&A & Key Learning Summaries Case Title: Designing a Superior Design Team

3. The company was formed in 1930s by Korean Government as a trucking company initially and was protected against foreign competition by government cover.

4. So far company was following intelligent mimicry product design of the leading brand as their success tool.

6. Doubled its R&D budget for next 05 years from $20 billion to $40 billion.

7. Increasing researchers in the R&D Center from 13,900 to 32,000.

8. Building an altogether new R&D center equipped with sophisticated product labs.

9. Adding multi-cultural talent in the R&D center from China, US & India.

10. Jelling the product design team more:

11. Encouraging Functional Conflicts within the group to generate new & innovate product ideas.

12. For keeping the originality side bright, designers are not forced to follow a formal office attire.

13. Against Korean national culture, junior staffers in the team are encourage to share their ideas freely.

16. R&D center management can definitely consider this structure but for that they need to consider:

17. Organization should be a learning organization.

18. Employee empowerment to use “people” in the field making best-suited situational decisions.

19. Strong communication within different wings is mandatory and for that strong MIS should be built.

20. Job targets should be objectively set and KPIs should be marked accordingly.

22. The exercise is that team of 04-05 members would be given 03 wood sticks, a funnel, a bundle of rope, a tennis ball and 18 inch long hard rubber strip and the group needs to come up with a model of a catapult in 40 minutes which can fire the ball at least to 12 feet distance.

23. Here we can see that team participants have a clear and time bound goal, have relevant skills. But they need unified and good communication among the team members to dialogue for the working design.

24. Definitely they need mutual trust and appropriate leadership for formalizing the team, agreeing to a conceivable design and in defining roles of design implementation drive.

25. Members also have to have Negotiating Skills to convince other members for the design and methodology of its working. Their joint goal would force them to provide due internal support for getting successful.

27. Work teams can yield best results when they are given specific targets and due empowerment.

28. As stated by Inter-actionist view, Functional conflicts are good for team to provide extended thought process and provide new ideas and solution approaches.

29. For highly professional and skilled workforce, work-team job model is the right model of having good results, provided teams are given clear goals, have mutual trust and unified / good communication.

30. Achievement of a major milestone for the organization is an occasion to rethink and re-strategize, not just for having celebrations.

31. Copying and refinement to other ideas’ can lead you to the top but cannot sustain you there.

32. Originality and Research on novel ideas is the key to open up new venues of customer products and maintaining the market leadership.

33. Shaping these ideas into workable products is necessary to sustain the competitive advantage and market leadership.