Working in a multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural environment further stimulated
the NGT process and enhanced the overall quality of the final product. With a
multiplicity of academic disciplines and public and private sector interests represented in
the group, each participant was forced to make their own area of expertise intelligible
without having the security of shared conceptualizations to rely on. The free flow of
conflicting ideas and concepts proved to be particularly critical for creative thinking and
for discovering new connections between topical areas and academic disciplines that
otherwise might have seemed at odds. As participants were allowed sufficient time to
explain their ideas, ethnocentric acts of judging each other based on one’s own criteria or
conventional categories of gender, age, race, ethnicity or discipline were avoided