5 ways to build a successful innovation team
There are five key areas to get right to make the most of your teams skills
Photo by Isai Ramos on Unsplash
Being successful in innovation takes time
Building a successful innovation team is tough. Most organisations are set up to run business as usual campaigns. Not to successfully innovate new audience-led ideas.
When creating innovation teams, common mistakes are made in culture, structure, and working methods. This leads to deep levels of dissatisfaction as natural innovators become frustrated at not being able to execute their ambitions or move quickly enough. Indeed, 51% of people in innovation roles leave after three years.
But there are also many solutions available to build a successful innovation team. Let’s dive into what we have learned over years at the coal face.
5 mistakes that will demoralise your innovation team and make them leave
1. Income Targets. Give them a big income target. Income targets against early-stage innovation activity drive short-term thinking and risk aversion. Instead of focusing on medium and long-term returns - the team will focus on short-term quick wins. Decision making will move away from your audience's wants and needs to what will bring in cash in the next 12 months.
2. Failure. Never talking about it. Innovation is a risky business, and failure is part of it. If you act like everything you do succeeds, your team will never want to do anything new or risky. You need to create psychological safety for your teams to fail.
3. Income and expenditure models. Making them build income and expenditure models for products that don't exist yet. An old classic. The team will be extremely frustrated in guessing how they might spend their budget in future innovation cycles and the returns in 2027. You can’t build detailed financial models for ideas that are yet to exist. It’s a waste of their time and yours.
4. Idea bombs. Passing all random ideas their way. These are called idea bombs. Your team will not cherish working on the CRM project, considering that digital affiliate programme no one understands and pushing forward with the CEO's daughter’s fundraising idea. This happens a lot. Robust teams work out a way to hold ideas, consider them against others and reject those that don’t fit the priority criteria.
5. Sign-off - adding in lots of extra layers of sign-off will drive the team to distraction and slow them down. Ideas designed by committee are seldom a good idea as they veer away from audience-led design into organisation-led design, which is less attractive to your consumer/supporter.
Don't do those things if you want to build growth and success in innovation!
“‘Innovation is a tree that you water, feed, protect, and nurture over years.’”
As Scott Kirsner puts it so eloquently in this short article ‘Innovation is a tree that you water, feed, protect, and nurture over years.’
If you want to attract the BEST innovators in fundraising, then follow these steps:
1. Remove income targets and build in sustained investment so the team can focus on big wins. Take a medium to long-term view and make a sustained investment in the team to focus on building propositions that focus on the intersection of your purpose as an organisation and audience need. Outputs will be far more ambitious in scope and return significant gains.
2. Build a culture supportive of failure. Get your Executive team on board & vocal about some of their own misses. When staff see senior leaders talking about failure, they will start to believe they can as well. If you want new products, audiences and growth, not everything you try will work. If your staff think they will be judged or punished for trying and something not working - they simply won’t try anything new or risky.
3. Work with your finance team to create a set of measures and indicators that make sense to both parties. Building income models for ideas that are yet to be market-tested is not a good use of time. Instead, work on developing a set of metrics that can give insight into the performance of the team and pipeline outputs. Metrics should help you learn. What indicators give you the insight you need to scale up investment? Simple income and expenditure models based on return on investment, lifetime value and cost per acquisition won’t do that.
4. Create an innovation strategy that shows what is out of scope for the team. With a robust strategy communicated, what your team is working on should be clear. And what does not fit the bill. Empower them to say no to things so they can work on propositions that return big for your target customers and segments.
5. Regularly review your sign off process to ensure it is lean and fit for purpose. Innovation teams cannot operate well working within processes that have been designed to optimise business as usual campaigns. They need a bespoke approach and sign off route to move at speed - and pivot in different directions as they receive customer feedback. Waiting months for data, digital amends and perfectly executed brand evolutions hold them back from working out quickly what does or doesn’t work.
If you enjoyed this and want to create a more innovative culture, then read our 11 tips to innovate in your workplace
We love talking to people about innovation. If you want to talk in detail about how to build a successful innovation team please drop us an email on hello@flyingcarsinnovation.com.