The image was created with the help of Microsoft Designer

This piece has been originally posted to Medium.

You can hear this time and again: innovation is all about people. Even if you’re a great fan of AI, you’d hardly expect robots to replace human innovators any time soon. And if you also love another popular cliché, the one saying that innovation is a team sport, you arrive at a natural conclusion that to pursue a corporate innovation project, you need a dedicated innovation team.

Do you need an innovation team?

Or perhaps not. Many people believe that “innovation is everyone’s job” and argue that any structure kills creativity and stifles innovation. Worse, the idea that “innovation is everyone’s job” is alive and well in some organizations. (I happened to work for one.)

Why? Because this allows corporate leadership to adopt a hands-off approach to innovation. No need to formulate the company’s innovation strategy and identify key business problems to solve. No need to design and implement specific innovation programs. No need to create a reward and recognition system that would incentivize employees’ engagement in innovation activities.

Instead, corporate leaders announce an open season for “ideas,” launch an innovation hackathon or two, and then claim that the collective wisdom of the whole company has been harnessed. (Ironically, helping this hands-off approach to innovation survive is the proliferation of easy-to-use innovation management software.)

Fortunately, more and more corporate leaders understand the need and the value of creating a dedicated innovation team. Of course, every employee should ideally take part in innovation projects, but it’s the ultimate responsibility of the innovation team to take ownership of the whole process. Besides, anyone with even a passing knowledge of how corporations work knows that when everyone is responsible for something, no one is.

And then, a crucial question arises: how to build your innovation dream team?

A few approaches exist.

Innovative people for innovation teams

The first approach emphasizes the personal skills of the team members. That’s why you can sometimes hear that the best way to staff your innovation team is to hire…innovative people. Great advice, of course, but unfortunately, with limited practical value.

This is not to say that more specific recommendations are unavailable. For example, Soren Kaplan suggests looking for these five qualities when recruiting new members of innovation teams:

§ Leapfrogging mindset: a desire to view the world with the goal to change it.

§ Complementary knowledge: possessing the knowledge and expertise that is complementary to what already exists in your organization.

§ Strategic relationships: bringing along a strong network of business partners.

§ Ambiguity tolerance: the ability to make decisions based on limited data.

§ Optimistic persistence: the ability to persist through tough times.

I like these suggestions, I really do. However, I suspect that most corporate HR departments, even those equipped with advanced evaluation tests, will have trouble finding enough candidates to meet such a high standard.

When a revolutionary meets a magic maker

The second approach pays less attention to the skill set of individual team members; instead, it emphasizes the need for their optimal mix. This approach focuses on the functional roles each member of the team plays in the project. To this end, Braden Kelley suggested that each innovation team should include nine personas, of which the following five are, in my opinion, the most important:

§ Revolutionary: a team member generating and sharing ideas.

§ Connector: a team member bringing people together.

§ Customer Champion: a team member responsible for interactions with customers.

§ Magic Maker: a team member responsible for implementing novel ideas and solutions.

§ Evangelist: a team member creating a buzz about the project and its results within the organization.

(The other four roles are Conscript, Artist, Troubleshooter, and Judge.)

This approach is obviously more practical than the first. In fact, many organizations have already adopted the spirit, if not the exact letter, of it by creating innovation joint task forces composed of representatives from different corporate units and functions: R&D, sales, marketing, customer service, finance, legal, etc.

Implicit in the formation of such innovation teams is the understanding of the importance of including people with diverse professional expertise and experience.

In recent years, the concept of functional diversity has been solidified by a growing body of evidence suggesting that socially diverse groups (i.e., those with a diversity of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation) are more innovative than socially homogeneous groups. Research shows that socially diverse groups are better at solving complex problems not only because people with different backgrounds bring new information, but also because the mere presence of individuals with alternative viewpoints forces group members to work harder to sharpen their own arguments.

This is good news for HR managers in charge of creating innovation teams. In our rapidly globalizing business environment, bringing together people with diverse professional and social attributes is much easier than chasing individuals with nebulous qualities such as leapfrogging mindset.

It’s all about the process

There is the third approach to the formation of innovation teams. This approach doesn’t dwell on the team composition or individual skills of its members; it emphasizes the way the team operates.

The logic behind this approach was eloquently articulated in a 2015 article by Google’s Julia Rozovsky. The article argued that the composition of a team mattered much less for its success than how the team members interacted, structured their work, and viewed their contribution. The article listed five key factors that set apart successful Google teams:

§ Psychological safety: team members take risks without feeling insecure or embarrassed.

§ Dependability: team members count on each other to do high-quality work.

§ Structure & clarity: teams have clear goals, roles, and execution plans for each member.

§ Meaning of work: team members are working on something that is personally important to them.

§ Impact of work: team members believe that their work matters.

Interestingly, it’s the first factor, psychological safety, that was by far the most important of the five. The safer team members felt with one another, the more likely they were to admit mistakes, work together, and take on new roles — and this obviously positively affected every aspect of their work.

The very notion that innovation requires taking risks without fear of negative repercussions is hardly new. We all used to hear calls to “fail fast and often” (or even to “celebrate failures”) as a surrogate invitation to innovate. However, as I argued before, while voiceful in advocating risk-taking, relentless experimentation, and learning from mistakes — all being parts of the elusive “culture of innovation” — companies often fail to introduce specific corporate policies encouraging such behavior.

From words to deeds

Based on my research of factors boosting innovation, I’d like to propose a few specific recommendations for building corporate innovation teams:

1. Create a brand-new team for each strategic innovation project and adopt a modular approach to the formation of innovation teams.

To avoid groupthink, I recommend creating a brand-new team for each strategic innovation project. This may result in the project’s slower start; however, the benefits of the cognitive diversity brought by new members will eventually outweigh the cost of the initial delay. I further recommend that each innovation team include members of the core innovation team (thoroughly trained in innovation management tools) and outsiders from different units, functions, and locations. Naturally, this modular approach requires the creation of a firm-wide repository of employees with a track record of involvement in innovation activities. At some point, such a repository should start collecting data assessing the innovation skillsets of prospective team members and their optimal functional roles within the team.

2. When creating innovation teams, use a mix of subject-matter experts in the project’s domain and non-experts in this specific area.

This recommendation takes a cue from a 2016 study that showed that the high ratio of domain experts on corporate boards resulted in poor performance of respective firms. The major problem with having too many domain experts on the board was “cognitive entrenchment,” the inability of expert-dominated boards to effectively respond to new information, especially when faced with an increased level of uncertainty. (And an increased level of uncertainty is what innovation is all about!) Of course, the optimal ratio of SMEs vs. non-experts needs to be determined empirically, but for longer-term projects, it can be periodically adjusted.

3. When creating an innovation team for customer-oriented projects, include team members with demographic characteristics mirroring the ones of the prospective end users.

This recommendation is inspired by a 2013 report by the Center of Talent Innovation that found that when innovation teams had one or more members of the same gender, ethnicity, culture, age, or sexual orientation as the project’s target end user, the entire team was far more likely to understand this user’s needs, which increased the likelihood of success.

4. Place members of the innovation team — especially those involved in strategic innovation projects — on fixed-term (tenure-like) employment contracts, as opposed to employment at will.

This proposal is based on multiple studies (reviewed here) showing that the labor laws that make it more difficult to fire employees increase their participation in corporate innovation activities. The idea here is to provide members of the innovation team with immunity from failure for the whole duration of the innovation project, a bureaucratic equivalent of providing them with psychological safety.

5. Make stock option grants, as opposed to cash bonuses and other monetary or non-monetary rewards, the principal incentive for engaging employees in innovation projects.

This proposal is based on a 2015 finding that firms that offer stock options to non-executive employees are more innovative. This proposal, as the previous one, is based on a theoretical framework created by Gustavo Manso, who postulated that the optimal incentives motivating employees to innovate must include a combination of tolerance for failures in the short term and reward for success in the long term.

Of course, there is no guarantee that any of the proposed recommendations, especially taken alone, would result in an immediate positive outcome. But if you believe, as I do, in the importance of experimenting, then experimenting with the way you build your innovation team is a good place to start. Who knows, you may discover that the number of innovative people in your organization is larger than you expected.