Building a successful team—not only for innovation but of any kind—is no easy task. Most leaders are at the mercy of the organization’s strategy and budget, current team members’ experience, their own individual connections and influence, and the current talent pool. It’s why you see endless articles on team building, hiring, up-skilling, communication, and management.
Having met with hundreds of innovation teams throughout my career, I heard the same few stories over and over about how members came to be on the team: I knew so-and-so, I stumbled across the application and got hired, corporate needed members for a new team and I volunteered. Happenstance and personal connections built these innovation teams more often than intentionality.
And, unsurprisingly, most of their innovation initiatives never produced the outcomes they were envisioned for. Ron Price and I realized there was something missing as we wrote The Innovator’s Advantage years ago. Innovation teams consistently underestimate the value of people—when the people factor is actually the number one contributor to successful innovation activities.
Understanding your individual team members and how and when to bring them together on a project is one of the most important jobs as an innovation leader. You are responsible not only for the outcomes of your projects but for the execution process and planning to meet those desired results. To be a successful innovation team leader, you must master your understanding of people.
The Tool Your Innovation Team Needs
Ron and I determined this issue could be solved with what we call Innovation Fitness™. Innovation Fitness™ is a measurement of how well the talent, skills, and passions of the people on your team are aligned to achieve the desired outcomes at each of the Six Stages of Innovation. These stages—Identify, Define, Develop, Verify, Deploy, and Scale—are very distinct, requiring different activities and people best suited to those activities. With the Innovation Fitness™ Score, we are able to demonstrate that most people are good to great in one or two of these stages, but no one person can execute optimally in all on their own.
This is why you must carefully curate your teams for each stage of innovation. The Innovation Fitness™ Assessment maps each person on your team, showing their predominant behavioral styles, driving forces or motivators, individual acumen, and skills that can all be measured by the level of development. All of these elements are measured against what is required to produce the maximum output for each of the Six Stages of Innovation. As each stage builds up to the next, you have to lay the right foundation to see success in the next.
For example, creativity is a useful skill for Stage 1, the Identify Stage, in coming up with a lot of new ideas. That doesn’t mean it’s not required in Stage 2, the Define Stage, but it is less necessary. And when someone’s Innovation Fitness™ Report shows that they are low in creativity as a skill for Stage 1 and not at all interested in ideation, this validates their desire to not be involved in brainstorming sessions or ideating for the sake of ideating. They are better fit for activities in another stage of innovation.
When you use Innovation Fitness™ with your entire team, you’ll gain clarity on exactly who to involve in which innovation initiatives and when—so that you don’t have to make guesses or take chances on building a successful innovation team.
To learn more about Innovation Fitness™ and the Six Stages of Innovation, read The Innovator’s Advantage. To learn more about the Innovation Fitness™ Report and Assessment, click here.
