I’ve read a number of articles recently that talked about why internal innovation teams fail so I decided to write my own article trying to articulate what internal innovation teams should do if they want to be successful. Some of this is subjective and I would be extremely naive if I thought there was a silver bullet to creating a successful internal innovation team.
To make this easier to digest, I thought I would compile a list of five things successful innovation teams do. This is based on my journey and the innovation teams I have led.
1. Find and hire the right people
“The lessons I learned from the dark days at Alibaba are that you’ve got to make your team have value, innovation, and vision. Also, if you don’t give up, you still have a chance. And, when you are small, you have to be very focused and rely on your brain, not your strength”. Jack Ma
By far, the most important of my five points and something I spend most of my time thinking about. Hiring people that have worked in innovation is easy, hiring an inter-disciplined team that will work collectively to add value and demand the type of environment that will provide a greater chance of success for the business is not so easy. Most of the time these types of people are not normally found in a corporate environment but for me this is exactly why they need to be in the corporate environment, to disrupt the business from the inside and challenge their colleagues, relentlessly. Skill should not be a prerequisite but having the right mindset must be top of the list when identifying this person. To try and add more weight to this point, someone once said to me that to be successful you need to surround yourself with amazing people. This is something that I continuously try to do and encourage my team to do the same.
2. Building a playground where ideas can come to life
You can’t underestimate the need to have one physical space for the innovation team to dream and bring those dreams to life. Many business areas are ‘clear desk policy’ and rightly so but, in the innovation team this will have a negative impact on what you’re trying to do and the type of creativity you’re trying to evoke and nurture. No, it is not helpful to have a messy room or space but the team needs to be able to leave their electronics or their laser cutting project on the side so that you can start again the next day. Having this space will also enable you to have the fire alarm isolated when using laser cutters, 3D printer and soldering irons. Finally, you will be working on confidential concepts that don’t yet exist and these concepts not only need to be secure but need to have the right amount of protection to grow. This means staying away from colleagues outside the team until the right time and using your innovation space to create the theatre to gain the appropriate level of buy in that will help you take your concept to the next stage.
3. Focus on ‘thinking by making’
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things”. Steve Jobs
It is incredibly important to respect the strategic priorities of the business you’re in. This will always help set the direction of travel for you and help create a playground for you and the team to express yourselves and experiment in. However, I also believe that it is vital for the innovation team to have the autonomy to ‘think by making’ and accept that not having a plan is sometimes not a bad thing. There is something therapeutic about seeing people hacking and prototyping, trying to understand evolving human behaviours to identify new opportunities for the business you’re in. As a consequence you will start to identify other opportunities and learnings that are sometime lost when working with 3rd parties.
4. Change your mindset from ‘failing fast’ to ‘fast success’
I will start by pointing out that I am not implying you shouldn’t be failing fast, quite the opposite. I am saying that the focus must be on success and that ‘failing fast’ contributes to the success you’re trying to achieve. To elaborate, every experimentation has a failure(s) of some shape and size, but with these failures comes success. This is because you have been able to identify a new opportunity or you have proved that there is no new opportunity and there is no need to apply further effort or cash.
5. Socialise your success inside and outside your business
It is a natural human behaviour to want to be recognised. It is also a natural human behaviour to want to be part of something that is seen as successful. This is why it is really important to develop an identity for the team that is accessible inside and outside the business you work in. The benefits, by doing this, for your wider business is powerful and can help in the attraction and retention of talent as well as driving inclusivity to innovation. The innovation team needs to play the role of protagonist across the business and this type of thinking can encourage colleagues to want to be part of your world and support your vision and objectives and see an innovation team go from four people to, dare I say it, 84,000 people.
I hope that this blog has inspired you to set your own workplace resolutions. If you enjoyed this post, please clap or even comment with your own resolutions for this year — I’d love to hear them.
