Cross Functional Team and Creativity

Recently I was reading the HBR article How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity. Whether you know this or not, all the eight films released within a span of 13 years have been successful. I am sure you would seen atleast 4 out of these 8 films (A Bug’s Life; Toy Story 2; Monsters, Inc.; Finding Nemo; The Incredibles; Cars; Ratatouille; and WALL·E).

CEO of Pixar quotes that the reason for such a grand success is mainly due to Creativity in their team. He continues to say that,

Creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working effectively together to solve a great many problems.

If you carefully read the above lines, it is quite clear that, "people from different disciplines" is nothing but the cross functional teams as advocated by some of the Agile methods. It is also apparent that forming a component team with monotonic single disciplined team leads to failures, as compared to the multi disciplined Cross functional teams.