Bill Moggridge, the writer of the book Designing Interactions, was in London last week for a series of talks.At the Innovation Forum he stressed that for innovation processes it is important to have inter-disciplinary teams that are driven by design-thinking.
This does not necessarilly mean that designers are running the show. That would be too naive. Every member of the team contributes specialised skills and knowledge, but they all understand the design perspective. The basic challenge is how to enhance the collaboration between these specialists. 
Inter-disciplinary collaboration is getting more and more crucial these days. There are more disciplines involved, the projects are more complex and a stronger level of collaboration is needed. We need to explore new ways of collaboration.
Bill is organising a conference on this topic in San Francisco in October. The title of the conference is Connecting’07. Might be worth a visit…