The Challenge: The “Innovation Silence”
Your organisation invests in innovations like labs, hackathons, agile transformations, new digital tools. Yet the teams using them don’t speak up, don’t challenge ideas, and don’t take the creative risks that drive breakthrough performance. Why?
Innovation Theatre
Programmes and budgets exist, but teams operate in fear of judgement. 60% of employees have held back an idea or concern at work in the last year. That’s your innovation pipeline leaking in silence.
The Google Gap
Google’s 2014 Project Aristotle proved psychological safety is the top predictor of team effectiveness. But Google is unique. No one has replicated this with causal evidence across European automotive, defence, manufacturing, or financial services. Until now.
One-Size-Fits-None
Generic culture programmes treat all teams the same, but company-wide measures fail to unlock innovation without team-level insights. Why do some teams thrive in the exact same environment while others fail? The real challenge is scaling that excellence with speed.
Isolated Measurement
Most organisations measure psychological safety in isolation, missing its causal link to innovation, retention, and team performance. Without measuring the full chain to business outcomes, you cannot identify the right levers or prove the ROI of your interventions.
Our Solution: Project Aristotle 2.0
CORE at LMU Munich and Tapir bring rigorous research on psychological safety and team performance to European enterprises through a privacy-preserving, co-created data product. This delivers causal evidence with two core advantages: Standardisation provides a validated, ready-to-deploy measurement instrument requiring zero internal development, and Cross-organisational intelligence reveals powerful benchmarks and causal patterns across multiple companies that no single organisation could uncover alone.
The Measurement Instrument
Our scientifically validated questionnaire connects psychological safety to concrete business outcomes without internal development effort.
- Core Safety: Measures the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.[6]
- Innovation & Learning: Captures idea generation, knowledge exchange, and collaborative development.[7], [8]
- Performance Metrics: Tracks engagement, retention, and hard business outcomes.[9], [10], [11]
All scales are peer-reviewed with optional GDPR-compliant data structuring.
People Data Collaboration
Discover insights that a single organisation's data cannot reveal through the Tapir community.
- Cross-Industry Benchmarking: Compare your teams against peers across various regulated industries.
- Root Cause Analysis: Identify specific leadership behaviours and structures that drive impact.
- Outlier Insights: Learn best practices from teams outperforming despite high pressure.
Target Group
- Organisations: Large enterprises in manufacturing, finance, tech, and defence.
- Geographies: DACH region, EU, Switzerland, and the UK.
- Context: For organisations undergoing transformation or scaling agile workflows.
Typical Roles
- CHROs and Heads of People & Culture.
- Heads of Innovation and Organisational Development.
- People Analytics Leads and Business Unit Leaders.
Your Business Outcomes: Innovation You Can Prove
Unlock Your Teams’ Innovation Capacity:
High-safety teams innovate 2.5× more and perform 5× better. Stop paying for withheld ideas.
Reduce Turnover of Your Best People:
Boost engagement by 76% and cut turnover risk by 27% by ensuring your talent’s voice matters.
Prove ROI with Causal Evidence:
Deliver hard data that survives CFO scrutiny and demonstrates a 230% average return on investment.
High Impact, Low Complexity:
Drive measurable shifts in weeks with simple, targeted manager interventions. No expensive multi-year transformations required.
Leading Research and leading Organisations co-creating Data Products
Psychological Safety for Innovation is a co-created data product on top of Tapir combines LMU Munich’s world-class field experiment methodology with privacy-preserving cross-organisational data collaboration. You gain causal, not correlational, understanding of what drives your teams’ ability to innovate, speak up, and perform. Translated into focused, evidence-led action that your leadership team can act on immediately.
Prof. Dr. Florian Englmaier
Professor of Organizational Economics,
Dean of Faculty and Strategy, LMU Munich
Florian Englmaier leads a top European research group on organisational economics and team performance. His work—published in the Journal of Political Economy, The Leadership Quarterly, and MIT Sloan Management Review—bridges academic rigour with executive decision-making. He is a former Harvard PostDoc, visiting scholar at Stanford GSB and Kellogg, and Co-founder of Predictive People Analytics (PPA).
Dr. Dominik Grothe
Head of Research, Economics Department,
LMU Munich
Dominik Grothe is the research engine behind PPA’s field experiments on leadership, incentives, and team performance. Co-author of publications in the Journal of Political Economy and The Leadership Quarterly, his work on non-routine analytical team tasks provides the empirical foundation for understanding how teams solve complex problems under real-world conditions.
Why This Matters Now
Google ran Project Aristotle over a decade ago. The insight was clear: psychological safety is the foundation of team effectiveness. But for most organisations, the question was never whether it matters, it was what to do about it and how to prove it works.
Project Aristotle 2.0 aims to go one step further with a longterm people data collaboration enabled deep research project with 5-10 complex organisations aiming to accelerate and enable innovation at scale and co-creating the “Psychological Safety for Innovation” data product.
Sources & References
- Castro, S., Englmaier, F. & Guadalupe, M. (2022). Fostering Psychological Safety in Teams: Evidence from an RCT. SSRN Working Paper.
- Englmaier, F., Grimm, S., Grothe, D., Schindler, D. & Schudy, S. (2025). The Value of Leadership: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment. The Leadership Quarterly, 36(3).
- Englmaier, F., Grimm, S., Grothe, D., Schindler, D. & Schudy, S. (2024). The Effect of Incentives in Non-Routine Analytical Team Tasks. Journal of Political Economy, 132(8), 2695-2747.
- Rider, C., Ferrère, A., Belovai, Z., Guadalupe, M. & Englmaier, F. (2023). Proven Tactics for Improving Teams' Psychological Safety. MIT Sloan Management Review.
- Google re:Work (2014). Guide: Understand Team Effectiveness. (Project Aristotle)
- Edmondson, A.C. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.
- Janssen, O. (2000). Job Demands, Perceptions of Effort-Reward Fairness and Innovative Work Behaviour. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 73(3), 287-302.
- Bresó, I., Gracia, F.J., Latorre, F. & Peiró, J.M. (2008). Development and Validation of the Team Learning Questionnaire. Comportamento Organizacional e Gestão, 14(2), 145-160.
- Cammann, C., Fichman, M., Jenkins, D. & Klesh, J. (1983). Assessing the Attitudes and Perceptions of Organizational Members. In S. Seashore et al. (Eds.), Assessing Organizational Change.
- Schaufeli, W.B. & Bakker, A.B. (2004). Job Demands, Job Resources, and Their Relationship with Burnout and Engagement. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 25(3), 293-315.
- Kirkman, B.L. & Rosen, B. (1999). Beyond Self-Management: Antecedents and Consequences of Team Empowerment. Academy of Management Journal, 42(1), 58-74.