The design and production of new products and services is an endeavor that calls for the skills and experience of interdisciplinary teams to get the job done. Yet, as a half-century of research makes abundantly clear, teamwork is difficult. The competing viewpoints that promote creative ideas and sound decision-making can also lead to conflicts that waste precious time and erode relationships. The authors present five key challenges faced by new product development teams and describe how these very challenges can lead to positive outcomes such as project management skills, broad perspectives, expanded networks and boundary-spanning skills.

Explores the numerous initiatives Children's Hospital and Clinics has undertaken to improve patient safety since the late 1990s--from the perspective of 2007. The case thus updates the A case by revisiting the hospital to find out what happened as a result of the ambitious change program launched over eight years earlier. It elaborates the ways in which Children's COO Julie Morath seeks to continue to improve hospital operations by involving nurses, physicians and even patients' families in an ongoing organizational learning process. The 2-case series is particularly distinctive in tracking an organizational change initiative for almost a decade and, as such, uncovers and promotes discussion of the important, granular details of change leadership in a messy, knowledge-based organization.

Madison Memorial Hospital is deciding between a variety of quality improvement strategies. Highlights quality improvement collaboratives--organized programs popularized by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in which teams from multiple institutions work together to improve care in a specified topic area (e.g., infection rates)--as a potential strategy. Allows debate around the criteria for selection of quality improvement strategies. Also motivates the discussion of the effectiveness of collaboratives and more broadly, the effectiveness of intra-organizational versus inter-organizational approaches to improvement.

General Electric launched Bridges to Excellence Diabetes Care Link, a program through which enrolled physicians receive bonuses of up to 10% of their salary for delivering quality care to diabetic patients covered by a participating employer or health plan. A day later, the Wall Street Journal labeled the program a "bribe." The case explores this accusation and the assumption that purchasers and consumers must explicitly pay for quality in heath care. Also allows evaluation of a specific program from design (e.g., financial reward structure) to implementation (e.g., parties involved). The question of scalability arises, as does the criteria by which to judge success.