Build a Fast and Efficient Innovation Team

Innovation is essential in a competitive marketplace, and speed is crucial to stay ahead of competitors. The faster you can recognize trends, threats, and opportunities, the faster great ideas get developed and pushed to the market, thus leading to earlier earnings and brand building. Effective innovation teams require people with varied skill sets, including finance, marketing, sales, service, and delivery. Teams should work quickly and efficiently to prevent dysfunction, which may slow down the innovation process. Additionally, getting the right people on the team, i.e., top-notch talent who possess a combination of innovation-specific skills, is crucial. Innovation-specific skills include empathy, listening, observing, modeling, ideating, and acceptance of or tolerance for risk. Start-ups, especially those backed by venture capital, are more sensitized to these critical skills and often look for recruits with those skills. Finally, firms must create conditions that encourage makers to work at risk, including empathy, ideation, and prototyping.