Let your innovation teams organise themselves
Here’s an idea — don’t fixate the teams when starting out on a batch of innovation projects. Let them choose how to organize themselves.
The making of innovation teams
The energy of events like Startup Weekend or Lean Startup Machine has always appealed to me. People come together on Friday night with nothing more than a couple of ideas and they leave with fully working products by the Sunday afternoon. They form teams within an hour and get to work. I attended many of them either as a participant or coach.
Interestingly, some people participate in Startup Weekends frequently. They don’t necessarily start a company and simply enjoy the birth of ideas. They flock from team to team. The output of actual companies who consists of teams formed at Startup Weekend is not that high. I remember local organizers patting themselves on the back if one company came out of the weekend alive.
Also, it was obvious when a team was nailing it. I know a few successful startups which came together at a Startup Weekend or Lean Startup Machine event and as a mentor it was very easy to spot that they were doing it right even within a weekend.
The impact of bad teams on innovation success
On the flipside I’ve seen many startups with toxic team dynamics, missing skills and alike. Founders often pursuit ideas for which they lack the skills or domain expertise to execute properly on them. It’s in the top 3 reasons for startup failure, according to CB Insights:
The same holds true for corporate innovation teams. In the corporate innovation context another complicating factor is time and resources. The best and most entrepreneurial employees will be kept at bay by their bosses to perform in the business. As a result, the average innovation team is a mixed bag, which often stalls the progress of the project. For example, you’ll find an idea owner who can only spend one hour per week and is accompanied by an intern and some external consultant.
Why bad teams stick together
For some reason these badly organized teams stick together. This can be explained by the sheer coincidence of joining an internal pitch competition after a random coffee encounter. Innovation program managers take them in as teams and then start to manage around the poor team setup.
In some cases, teams get a few months to bring the idea to a working new business at a fulltime basis. There will be a startup-like bootcamp, in which the intrapreneurs get trained on stuff like Lean Startup, Business Modeling and Scrum. The experience is similar as with a Startup Weekend. Then, for some reason, these teams get fixated right then and there.
I’ve had many late night calls with team members as well as program managers I coached in which the main topic was: ‘this team sucks, how can I fix this?’. Additionally, some innovation projects get killed very fast these days and it leaves the team members without work and no other option, but to return to their previous job. One guy once literally said to me: ‘Give me a rope and I’ll find a tree. I’d rather die than go back to my old department.’
The way out: keep it flexible
You can prolong this Startup Weekend vibe for several months if you invest in the facilitation skills to do so. If the participants can self-select who they can work with to run the next iteration, these issues can be resolved easily.
There are even accelerator programs these days that apply this principle, such as Entrepreneurs First. They have coined the term idea/founder fit and I believe very strongly that this is the right way of looking at this early-stage innovation process around ideas.
It is very easy to tell when a team is actually killing it. Once you see that it’s working, it would be the right time to fixate them and let them grow the venture.
