Tips to build and sustain innovation teams as part of your organizational culture
Successful organizations understand that innovation must be deeply integrated into their culture and business practices. This means fostering an individual innovative mindset that is also brought to life in dynamic innovation teams.
This article shares some practical tips to help your organization innovate through a key dynamic: teams. Innovation teams that continually challenge themselves to accelerate and create can offer significant competitive advantages and develop products and services that directly address the challenges consumers face in your market.
What do we mean by an innovation team?
Innovation teams bring together people from different departments, divisions, and backgrounds within a company. This mix of personalities and working styles helps foster creativity, as team members see things from diverse perspectives shaped by their history, values, and roles in the organization. Diversity in ideas, backgrounds, careers, and values is essential when building an innovation team.
Most innovation teams also appoint a team leader responsible for setting up processes, facilitating discussions, and gathering input. The team leader should inspire others and “bring out the best” in everyone involved. Ultimately, innovation teams are there to innovate — which requires working in creative, nontraditional ways to develop new solutions together.
How do innovation teams differ from traditional teams?
Innovation teams are formed specifically to explore and discover new ideas or ways of doing things that can improve business performance (products, services, customer experiences, etc.).
These teams typically use design thinking and innovation methods and activities to brainstorm, collaborate, design, and prototype solutions that address critical user challenges.
What makes a team successful and truly innovative?
One of the most important factors is the team’s ability to collaborate effectively, ensuring everyone’s ideas and feedback are heard. True teamwork means active participation: sharing thoughts and ideas openly and working together to overcome fundamental challenges facing the organization.
Beyond collaboration, innovation teams must also overcome the fear of failure. Innovation, by nature, involves risk and mistakes — so teams shouldn’t fear making errors, proposing “bad” ideas, or trying something that ultimately doesn’t work. In fact, failure can be an incredibly positive part of the innovation process, helping teams discover what does work by showing what doesn’t.
Leadership is also key. Managers and team leaders keep the team motivated, engaged, and ready to act by guiding them through the process. A good leader inspires team members to participate in activities that help them think differently and uncover new insights about users or challenges — leading to better solutions.
What skills do innovation teams need?
When building an innovation team, look for members with these essential skills:
Problem-solving and collaboration: Identifying and defining challenges, and working effectively with teammates, colleagues, and users to co-create solutions.
Creative and critical thinking: These may seem opposite, but both are vital. Creative thinking encourages the free flow of new ideas, while critical thinking helps teams focus on the ideas most worth exploring further.
Empathy: The ability to connect with and understand others. Empathy helps teams better understand users and stakeholders and design solutions around their real needs.
Curiosity: Teams with a curious mindset actively explore different solutions and invest in learning more.
How to enable and sustain innovation
Smart organizations know that innovation isn’t limited to a single workshop or brainstorming event. To sustain innovation, teams need top-down support: time, resources, and ongoing encouragement to keep innovating well beyond the initial session.
An innovation culture is built around the idea that anyone can contribute the next “big idea” — and that failure isn’t just inevitable; it’s necessary to ultimately achieve success.
Virtual collaboration for innovation teams
In today’s world, collaborating virtually across locations is increasingly common, and innovation teams must adapt their strategies accordingly. Virtual collaboration is different from in-person communication in obvious ways, but it doesn’t have to be less effective or valuable.
A virtual innovation team can use digital tools to work together seamlessly, no matter where members are located.
Remote collaboration tools like Mural, Zoom, Miro, or Slack can help ideas flow, keep research and learning moving forward, and maintain momentum outside traditional meeting rooms.
With an online whiteboard, teams can brainstorm, plan, and test different techniques or strategies together. Rough prototypes can be created and shared online with potential customers or stakeholders to get feedback and see how solutions might work in the real world.