In this chapter we move from the individual to the group: how innovation teams are formed and organized, and what distinguishes a team that carries its idea through to implementation. We then widen the lens to broader organizational participation: how an organization can open the door to innovation for all its employees without drowning in ideas it cannot respond to.
An organization tasked a team of five outstanding engineers in its IT department with developing a solution to reduce data-entry errors in a service run by the operations unit. The team worked enthusiastically for four months, built a sophisticated automated validation system, and presented it at a closing meeting where it won the admiration of everyone in the room. Two weeks later, however, the operations staff refused to use it: it added three screens to a procedure they performed dozens of times a day, and no one had asked them during development how they actually worked. The problem was not the engineers' competence. It was that the entire team had come from one place and had worked within its own boundaries.
The case shows that a good team requires more than good individuals. An innovative team is designed: whom it includes, what roles its members play, how it connects with people outside it, and where it sits in the structure. These questions are the focus of this chapter. We take them up one by one before moving on to the wider participation that opens innovation to every employee.
After studying this chapter, the reader should be able to:
Wuchty, Jones, and Uzzi analyzed some twenty million scientific papers and two million patents spanning several decades. They found that teams have come to dominate knowledge production in nearly every field, and that work produced by teams is more likely to be highly influential than work produced by individuals (Wuchty et al., 2007). The explanation is that the problems worth innovating on have become too complex for any single discipline to encompass, and the knowledge needed to solve them is distributed among different people.
Yet a team is not the sum of its members. A team of average performers may achieve what a team of stars cannot, if it knows how to combine its members' knowledge and reach the people it needs. Innovators need an environment, and the team is the environment closest to them; it is there that they find, or fail to find, much of what they need.
This is borne out in the experiences of innovators themselves. In a phenomenological study of the experiences of prominent Saudi innovators, nine of the eleven participants counted working with a supportive team among the reasons for their success, as when a partner took over operational tasks so that the innovator could concentrate on development (Alsamani, 2023).
Hülsheger, Anderson, and Salgado brought together more than thirty years of research in a meta-analysis of team-level predictors of innovation. They found that factors related to processes within the team had a stronger effect than factors related to its composition (Hülsheger et al., 2009). Figure 9.1 summarizes the most prominent of these factors.
This finding has a direct practical implication. Organizations invest considerable effort in selecting team members, then leave the team to work without a shared vision, without contact with beneficiaries, or without real support for experimentation. The research suggests that what happens within and around the team matters more than the list of its members' names. Note, too, that diversity helps when it is diversity of knowledge relevant to the specific problem. Another review showed that diversity cuts both ways: it broadens the knowledge available to the team, but it can also open the door to division, and the outcome depends on the team's ability to exchange and integrate information (van Knippenberg & Schippers, 2007).
Team configurations vary as widely as their tasks, but innovation teams generally need five roles to be covered; in small teams, one person may hold more than one of them:
Composition is also tied to stage. While exploring the problem, the team needs wider diversity and closer proximity to beneficiaries. While developing the solution, it needs technical depth. At scale-up, it needs people with operational experience. Team composition is therefore best treated as a decision to be revisited as the initiative moves from one stage to the next.
Equally important is the way members join the team. A team whose members join by choice, out of interest in the problem, starts with a different kind of motivation from one whose members were assigned without being asked. Many organizations combine the two: leadership defines the problem and the roles required, then opens the door to anyone who wishes to volunteer. This is another application of autonomy within boundaries.
External communication was among the strongest innovation factors in the meta-analysis above. Ancona and Caldwell studied this aspect in product development teams and found that the most successful teams were not necessarily those with the most external contact, but those that carried out specific kinds of external activity, above all communicating with leadership to secure support and resources, and coordinating with the other units on which the work depended. Teams that confined themselves to gathering general information, without these two activities, performed worse (Ancona & Caldwell, 1992). Figure 9.2 illustrates these activities.
This finding casts the opening case in a new light: the engineering team succeeded at technical scouting and presented its final result skillfully to leadership, but it never coordinated with the unit that would use the solution. It also confirms what Chapter 7 said about the importance of a network of relationships in moving an idea into implementation (Baer, 2012). An innovative team works at its boundaries as much as within them.
Write down the names of the people whose cooperation your team needs for its solution to be genuinely used. Then put a mark next to those you have spoken with in the past four weeks. The unmarked names are your project's biggest risks.
Where a team sits in the structure depends on the degree of innovation required. Clark and Wheelwright distinguished four structures for development teams, graded by how fully members are dedicated to the team and how much authority its leader holds (Clark & Wheelwright, 1992). Table 9.1 presents them.
| Structure | What it looks like | Suited to | Risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Functional | Each member works in their own unit, and the work passes from one unit to the next in sequence | Small improvements within a single unit | Slowness, and no one who owns the whole outcome |
| Lightweight | A coordinator follows up the work, while members remain attached to their units | Improvements that touch more than one unit to a limited extent | A coordinator without authority, so unit priorities prevail |
| Heavyweight | A leader with strong authority and members dedicated part- or full-time, who remain linked to their units | Significant innovation that requires integration across units | Tension between the leader and unit managers if authority is not settled |
| Autonomous | A dedicated team outside the usual structure, with its own rules and resources | Radical innovation, or innovation that conflicts with the existing model | Difficulty bringing the solution back into the organization once it succeeds |
Organizations frequently assign lightweight teams to tasks that call for heavyweight ones: employees are asked to devise a solution that will change how three departments work, they work on it after finishing their regular duties, and they are led by a coordinator who cannot ask anything of anyone. The result is predictable. This connects with what Chapter 6 showed about time as the scarcest enabler of innovation.
Alongside assigned teams, many organizations seek to involve all their employees in innovation through idea platforms, competitions, and internal challenges. This is the right direction: valuable ideas can come from anywhere, and the employee closest to a problem sees it before anyone else. Yet such participation often fails for a simple reason. The organization opens the door to more ideas than it can respond to, most of them end up in decision limbo, and participants learn that taking part is pointless.
A study of an open idea platform launched by a major technology company reveals another side of the problem. Bayus found that repeat contributors were better than others at offering ideas the company judged valuable, but they seldom repeated their first success once their ideas had been implemented, tending instead to propose ideas resembling what had worked before (Bayus, 2013). A steady flow of good ideas therefore takes more than a platform; it takes a design that keeps renewing broad participation.
Successful participation tends to share four features:
At a university, this might take the form of an annual innovation day at which students present their projects alongside their faculty supervisors, with senior leaders attending and taking part in the judging. The value of such a day lies in meeting several needs at once at modest cost: an opportunity to present, public recognition, connections between students and the bodies that could support their projects, and a signal from leadership about what it cares about. This is close to what one participant in the innovator study cited above recounted about a business incubator he had visited: he found that one secret of its success was that it brought emerging innovators together with innovators who had succeeded within the past three years, because they were closer to the obstacles the newcomers would face (Alsamani, 2023).
Broad participation is a promise to people that their ideas will be heard. The organization's capacity to keep that promise is what should determine how much participation it asks for.
Use this card when forming a new innovation team, then revisit it as the initiative moves from one stage to the next. Answer each question with specific names and actual facts. A blank answer points to a gap in the team itself.
| Dimension | Question | Answer |
|---|---|---|
| Problem and purpose | What is the problem? For whom? How will we know we have succeeded? Does every member state it in roughly the same words? | |
| Roles | Who is the leader? Who is the voice of the beneficiary? Who provides technical expertise? Who is the voice of operations? Who is the sponsor? | |
| Diversity | What knowledge does the problem require that the team lacks? | |
| Time | How many hours a week does each member actually devote? And which of their managers has agreed to this? | |
| Structure | Is the structure (functional, lightweight, heavyweight, autonomous) suited to the degree of innovation required? | |
| Boundaries | Which units do we depend on? And when do we communicate with the sponsor? | |
| Mode of joining | Did members join by choice, or were they assigned? Do they know why they were chosen? |