Cross-pollinated teams build better products

When a new hardware product or piece of equipment needs to break through, the safest bet is often a team that has developed solutions across many industries, not only your own. Variety in the team’s background widens the idea set, accelerates problem solving, and reduces blind spots that come from “how we’ve always done it.” That is the core argument in our CEO’s Forbes Business Council article on cross-pollinating innovation, and it matches what research calls knowledge brokering and cross-industry innovation. 

Why mixed-industry experience outperforms “pure domain” teams

Product teams face two kinds of work. Some tasks are routine and benefit from deep domain patterns. Others are novel and benefit from transferring ideas from far away. The second group is where mixed-industry teams shine.

• More candidate solutions per unit time. Engineers who have built sealed medical housings, rugged industrial enclosures, and consumer electronics can pull proven sealing, fastening, and tolerance strategies from multiple playbooks. This speeds early decision making without over-specifying. Evidence from knowledge brokering research shows that recombining ideas from different domains is a repeatable source of innovation. (Citation: Andrew Hargadon)
• Fewer shared blind spots. A homogenous team tends to share the same assumptions. Mixed backgrounds surface counterexamples faster, which reduces the cost of wrong turns. Systematic reviews of cross-industry innovation find that “distant” search often produces more original solutions when the problem is not well structured. (Citation: ScienceDirect)
• Better manufacturability options. Exposure to multiple processes and suppliers translates into more flexible DFM paths, alternate materials, and smarter tolerance stacks. Teams are less likely to default to a single process just because it is familiar.

The upshot is practical. Mixed-industry teams do not rely on hope or slogans. They bring a larger, tested library of mechanisms, materials, fixtures, and supply patterns to the starting line.

“But they don’t know our industry” — the common objections

Skepticism is healthy. Here are the usual concerns and how to handle them without sacrificing the benefits of cross-pollination.

• Compliance and safety. Some categories have standards that must be met. The solution is pairing. Put a domain specialist in the loop for standards and approvals, while keeping a broader team responsible for concept generation, prototyping, and DFM. Do not conflate regulatory compliance with the entire design space.
• Time to ramp. A capable mixed-industry team should run a short discovery loop to map the few domain-specific constraints that really matter: use conditions, target standards, environmental exposures, and service models. That front-loads understanding without closing off solution space.
• IP or competitive nuance. If your category has unwritten norms or crowded patents, early landscape scans and freedom-to-operate checks are compatible with cross-industry work. They help aim the search rather than narrow it to only local ideas.

Where cross-industry transfer pays off first

A few product areas tend to benefit quickly from ideas imported from other categories.

• Thermal and environmental design. Battery packs, outdoor sensors, and high-load power electronics all borrow thermal paths and sealing schemes from automotive, industrial, and medical. This often shortens the path to a robust enclosure and a stable thermal budget.
• Human factors and serviceability. UI control density, glove-friendly interactions, and field-service access have strong analogs across aviation, construction tools, and enterprise mobility. Mixed-industry teams have more examples to draw from.
• RF coexistence and EMC. Antenna placement, shielding, and ground strategies migrate well between wearables, industrial IoT, and automotive subsystems. Cross-domain teams tend to reach a viable test plan faster because they have seen more failure modes.
• Design for assembly and tolerance strategy. Precision plastic, die-cast, and sheet-metal parts share stack-up patterns across consumer and industrial goods. Experience with multiple processes reduces the risk of late geometry changes.

The pattern here mirrors what the research community calls technology brokering: moving ideas “from where they are known to where they are not,” then recombining them to fit the local constraints. 

How to structure a cross-pollinated project

You get the benefits of breadth without losing domain rigor by being explicit about roles, cadence, and evidence.

1. Start with a constraint brief, not a solution brief. Capture only the requirements that are truly fixed: regulatory class, environmental exposures, critical interfaces, size or mass limits, and cost targets. Keep everything else provisional. This aligns with our approach to invite the unknowns early rather than pretending they do not exist. 
2. Run a short cross-industry scouting pass. In one to two weeks, build a small pattern library from 3 to 5 analog domains. Focus on mechanisms, materials, joining, thermal paths, RF layouts, packaging, and test methods. Cite the source industry for each candidate so constraints are transparent. The literature calls this an effective on-ramp to recombination. 
3. Prototype to compare, not to perfect. Build two or three low-cost test articles that isolate the risky variables. The point is a decision, not a demo. Treat each iteration as a hypothesis test, then keep or discard patterns based on data.
4. Pull suppliers in early. Ask two process-capable vendors to react to the candidate patterns. Mixed-industry teams will often present options the supplier has seen elsewhere, which can improve tooling choices and yield.
5. Gate on evidence. End the first phase when exit criteria are met: for example, thermal rise within target under worst case load, or RF coexistence validated at key bands. Evidence beats anecdotes from any single industry.

How to evaluate a mixed-industry partner

If you are comparing proposals, look for signals that the team can transfer ideas responsibly and quickly.

• Transfer method, not just portfolios. Ask for a one-page description of how the team scouts analogs, captures patterns, and tests them in context. The presence of a method correlates with repeatability.
• Learning velocity. Request real prototype cycle times from recent work and a case where an outside-industry idea survived testing and moved to production.
• Supplier-aware DFM. Mixed-industry teams should show how they use supplier input to turn imported patterns into manufacturable geometry and stack-ups.
• Clear boundary setting. Look for plans to engage domain SMEs for regulatory, clinical, or safety-critical decisions, while keeping the broader team on concept and architecture.

These checks echo the logic in our CEO’s article. The goal is not novelty for novelty’s sake, but faster progress to a robust, manufacturable solution by drawing from a larger idea pool. 

When a “pure domain” team still makes sense

There are exceptions. If the product is largely an incremental update inside a mature, tightly regulated category, a domain-specialist team can execute efficiently. Even then, pulling a few patterns from adjacent domains can improve cost or reliability. Recent management research suggests that firms should match the search strategy to the problem’s uncertainty and the industry’s maturity, not to tradition. (Citation: Harvard Business Review)

Bottom line

Innovative hardware benefits from teams that have built across categories. Cross-pollinated teams bring more candidate solutions, spot hidden risks earlier, and reach manufacturable answers faster. The mechanism is not magic. It is disciplined transfer and testing of ideas that worked elsewhere. Structure the work to make that transfer explicit and evidence-driven, and you get the upside without losing the domain guardrails.