Innovation - without the right team it will fail

Anyone who has ever been involved in an innovation project in a company is familiar with this: meetings with colleagues that get out of hand, fruitless discussions about the right way to proceed, personal animosities between team members - and many different opinions instead of fact-based knowledge about the to do's.

Therefore, in the run-up to an innovation project, the homework in the setup of innovation management must be done internally, i.e., in the companies. This means putting together a suitable team.

Without commitment from top management, failure is imminent

But first: Is the innovation project supported and actively backed by top management? If this commitment is not given, the project can usually be buried on the spot - too many technical and financial obstacles, personal animosities and eternally outdated ideas lie on the stony path to innovation.

How should the innovation team be composed?

So how do you recruit the right people for the job? In their paper published in 2016, Philipp Wagner and Frank Piller from RWTH Aachen University describe the key conditions that need to be met if you want to set up an innovation team.

Which employees from marketing & sales, production, and research & development have in-depth knowledge of the innovation project?

Which employees have a particularly creative approach to problem solving?

Which employees are particularly open to new approaches and are not afraid of openly exchanging ideas with other colleagues in the company?

Which employees have experience in managing innovations - or are recognized in the organization as successful innovators?

Leadership and moderation of the innovation team

What was not explicitly mentioned by the authors, however, is the project management and moderation of the innovation team. It is of little use to assemble only specialists who are top in their respective fields - but have only underdeveloped leadership and moderation skills.

As far as moderation skills are concerned, these play an enormous role in collecting and evaluating different opinions and reflecting them in such a way that negative emotions do not arise in the first place - or at least can be kept in check and the functional activity is in the foreground. In the moderation of teams, not only is a great deal of tact required, but the moderator must also put his or her own sensitivities to the back of the queue. And - in innovation projects, these skills should be even more pronounced - after all, one is faced, at least in part, with unknown challenges.

Who is doing the job now?

Leading innovation teams is at least as challenging as facilitating them. If the two functions are not managed in personnel union, what is expected of project management? Does the highest-ranking person also automatically assume leadership of innovation teams? Is another person carried by the other team members? And if this is not the case, is it then determined "from above" how things should be run?

This question cannot be answered in a general way, but must be examined in each individual case. What is certain, however, is that managers in companies must ask themselves these questions before setting up an innovation, if the failure of the innovation project is not to be pre-programmed with the first «groundbreaking».

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