Creating, Growing, and Sustaining Efficient Innovation Teams

Economic forces such as the growing service economy and commoditization of traditional value chains have led many organizations to pursue breakthrough innovations as part of their business strategy. There has been an increased interest in collaboration and teamwork as catalysts of innovation, often without a clear understanding of the different kinds of teams that can be used to foster innovation or the kinds of team building that will be most likely to yield desired results. The author describes a framework for innovation teams, ranging from highly structured to spontaneous, giving examples of how different kinds of teams relate to the characteristics of the next generation of innovators. A case study illustrates how one approach using preference profiling is more likely to yield tangible results from an innovation team. Introduction – The Changing Nature of Innovation The global innovation – commoditization duality has never been more pronounced than in our current economy. Many organizations are investing in efforts designed to promote innovation, without a clear idea of how these investments translate into business value. Furthermore, organizations are also evolving from an industrial base to a service base. This is driven by several factors, including the removal of barriers to service relationships brought about by the virtualization and dissemination of information. However, value capture in the service market is based on customer perception and utility rather than more traditional metrics such as cost and quality [1]. Consequently, the value created through innovative service teams also goes largely unrecognized, making it difficult to assess the impact of teams charged with producing innovative results. There is a great body of literature on the theory of innovation, how people collaborate and the role, structure and types of innovation ecosystems that occur [2-5]. While many companies consider themselves innovative, most lack a common lexicon for understanding how their investments in innovation translate into business value. In particular, while it is recognized that collaboration is an important element of innovation, there is a need for better approaches to forming, growing, and sustaining teams of innovators. After reviewing the changing nature of innovation and the emerging generation of innovators, we propose a framework for classifying innovation teams (note: the pronoun we is used throughout the paper to refer to the task force