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Mussgnug, Moritz; Boës, Stefan; Meboldt, Mirko

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This work describes the concept of establishing principles for teams in new product development projects. Principles provide guidance for teams and support them in decision making. They turn behavioural patterns of teams that cover important aspects of collaboration, management as well as design-specific aspects, from an implicit to an explicit level and allow the team to develop a common understanding. Principles are formulated to invite for action with proactive phrasing and visualization of each key message. Aiming to let principle evolve into shared models for a team, we propose a sequence of steps from learning about principles for the first time to following a team-individual set of principles and taking consequential measures. To elucidate we introduce and illustrate a dozen principles. This exemplary set was presented to student teams and their coaches at the beginning of a nine month course for undergraduate students. In this preliminary and explorative study, the feedback of students and their coaches shows that the concept of principles was well understood by both groups and that they were stimulated to reflect upon them. The feedbacks also indicated, that the participants struggled to come up with new principles that differ from the provided examples. In the future, more thorough investigations shall be conducted into the usage of principles over the full duration of similar projects.

Keywords:

Principles, new product development, design teams, shared mental models