The Innovation Economy

What would it be worth, if your team solves the most pressing problem your company faces today?

What is the value of a great idea?

The new economy is innovation and the currency that drives it is ideas. Companies are seeing increased pressure to innovate. Overall spending on R&D from the world’s top 1,000 companies increased by 11.4% to a record $782 billion last year according to Strategy and Business. But even with this increase in spending, many companies are still finding it difficult to find the innovative ideas they need.

“For the entire 14 years we have conducted this annual study we have consistently found there is no statistically significant relationship between how much you spend on R&D and how well you perform,” according to Barry Jaruzelski, partner at PwC’s strategy consulting business development. “What does matter is the depth of your customer insight, the quality of the talent assembled, and rigor of the processes you employ.”

The demand for new and better ideas is increasing at an alarming pace. The entire landscape of business is changing with an avalanche of new information and possibilities. Our very culture is changing. We expect “new and better” as a regular course. Each time a new phone comes out we expect it to do more. We demand more of our cars, our home appliances, our entertainment systems, even our clothing. Innovation is becoming the rule of survival for a business rather than the exception. So where does this innovation come from? It comes from people and often it comes from teams of people working together to solve problems. Yet many companies are not capitalizing on the ideas of their employees because they have internal management structures that date back into the industrial age.

Team problem solving and idea generation is different than other work-related team tasks and requires a different style of management. Teamwork is often thought of as a group of highly skilled people working seamlessly in concert with each other. Examples might be a highly skilled pit crew, a professional sports team, an orchestra and any number of other teams where multiple individuals must work together with skill and precision. In these examples, team members spend countless hours practicing and rehearsing to perfect their individual roles. Problem solving, on the other hand, is not about precision and accuracy as much as it is about investigative thinking and creativity. Problem solving requires a step into the unknown. It is kind of the opposite of precision and accuracy at least in its beginning. Therefore, traditional management styles that stress conformity, accuracy and precision can often run counter to creating an environment where good team problem solving can happen.

To address the ever-increasing pressure of how to create an environment and management system that encourages rather than discourages team problem solving and idea generation, we set out on a massive research study to identify how the best teams solve problems together. The study is in partnership with one of the leading universities in the world (Carnegie Mellon University) in the study of team behavior. The problem with most research in team behavior has always been the lack of a sufficient sample size to be much more than antidotal evidence. By combining a detailed research study with an existing business that has controlled environments where people are expected to work together to solve complex problems in a limited time frame, we’ve finally gathered a large enough sample size to get validated data. This two plus year study has resulted in detailed analysis of more than 3,450 teams and counting. We no longer need to guess how the best teams solve problems. We have the data.

The data has allowed us to get a clear picture of attributes of great problem-solving teams. It has also surprised us in several areas, including the vast amount of unused potential in most corporate teams we studied. We see this unused potential in wasted time, unmotivated workers, poor communication, ineffective leadership, underutilized talents, unorganized efforts and many other aspects of ineffective teamwork. According to the data the average corporate team takes almost twice as long to solve problems than the best teams we studied.

We now know the DNA of the best problem-solving teams. We know their personality. We know their attributes. We know how they work. We know how they are managed. We know what must change to unlock their potential. We now have the data that shows it.

If you’d like to know more about the study and see the data, please contact me at Les@mysteryescaperoom.com