An Empirical Study Of Innovation in Manufacturing Teams: A Preliminary Report

We are currently engaged in a collaborative research project, the aim of which is to determine how new ideas are introduced and managed during group discussion. To this end, we have collected and transcribed a corpus of team meetings within UK manufacturing firms, and are beginning to code these meetings in order to characterise the turn-taking and decision making which occur within them. This paper situates this work by explaining why the general approach is necessary for understanding what happens during group decision making and describes the research methods which are being used and the areas which we intend to investigate.