“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.”
You’ve designed the first experiment you want to conduct. Now it’s time to take action, for which you need a team.
This immediately creates several complications, because the kind of team norms that lend themselves well to driving innovation will inevitably conflict with the norms of the more established parts of your organization. Those units are designed for repetition, efficiency, and reliability, while yours will be built for learning, adaptation, and flexibility.
GE’s former CEO Jack Welch framed the challenge this way: “You've got to eat while you dream. You've got to deliver on short-range commitments, while you develop a long-range strategy and vision and implement it. The success of doing both. Walking and chewing gum, if you will.”
As more organizations bump up against the challenge of activating internal innovation teams, numerous new solutions have emerged. describe the most popular ones. We have tried several of them with clients, studied the efforts of organizations to implement them, and looked at the patterns by which successful innovation teams succeed. From this experience we have pinpointed seven critical steps to building an effective innovation team from within:
Remove organizational friction.
Assemble a cross-functional team.
Align around an important goal.
Use metrics and data to track the most important thing(s).
Build a scoreboard everyone can see.
Establish a rapid rhythm.
Generate positive velocity.
This tool will help you think through and begin assembling the ideal team for advancing your innovation.