General assumptions about the innovation-oriented partnership between the two companies is that success grows out of a good relationship based on mutual trust, while poor cooperation and lack of trust lead to disaster. However, examples abound of high trust partnerships that fail to innovate and turbulent ones that succeed. Is belief overrated? This is sometimes an actual barrier to innovation? Can we think in terms of the optimal level of confidence - not too little and not too much? Because the samples are not sufficient to assess the correlation between the level of trust and innovation - it is impossible to separate the trust from many other factors - we have created a series of experiments using pairs of people who already knew each other and who have enough experience together to form different views trust. The results point to an important conclusion: how to increase mutual trust, creativity, partnership goes up, reaches a maximum and then begins to decline. Similarly for innovation. How to increase mutual trust, innovation also going up - but only up to a point, after which the decline of innovation, although it remains at a high level, because a large commitment. We explain this seemingly strange pattern as follows: If a team has a high level of trust and mutual care, people can become too accommodating, quickly taking them partners'ideas and thus reducing the number of dynamic purposeful conflict. Then, the team may have a lower creative tension, thus reducing the effectiveness of partnerships. The bottom line:. When invent together, trust is good, but avoid too much trust is better "Hide
by Francis Bidault, Alessio Castello Source: MIT Sloan Management Review 6 pages. Publication Date: July 1, 2010. Prod. #: SMR357-PDF-ENG
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