How to Build an Innovation Team for Improved Social Impact
By: Florence Navarro, Michelle Risinger, Monica H. Kang and Karen Reijnen
The 2018 Harvard Business Review article, If Your Innovation Effort Isn’t Working, Look at Who’s on the Team posits that a successful innovation team requires a unique balance of skills and mindsets to allow for sustained focus, agility, and optimism in the face of uncertainty for prolonged periods of time. Although the article did a great job summarizing some of the soft skills that are essential for an innovation team, it’s missing the key obstacles we face in the development industry.
“How might we hire innovative talent and build innovation teams in the social sector?”
For answers, a small group of innovators and talent experts convened at the Hiring for Higher Impact webinar on November 17, 2022. With their help, we’ve developed this three-step guide for creating an effective innovation team—complete with tools and advice that can be applied to any organization.
The Three Steps to Building a Thriving Innovation Team
Define Innovation (at Your Organization)
Understand Your Innovation Effort
Find the Essential Innovation Characteristics
We hope this guide serves as a framework as you embark on your innovation journey or improve the state of innovation at your organization.
1. Define Innovation (at Your Organization)
First, to know who should be on your innovation team, you need to know why you are seeking to innovate. Did your company just add the word innovation to its mission statement or maybe someone in the C-suite brought up the dire need for innovation as a competitive advantage? Whatever the reason, take a moment to discover your “why?” This will likely reveal important questions to consider for your innovation team’s survival in your organization. In addition to knowing your “why,” it also helps to…
Understand what innovation means to you.
Have a shared organizational definition of innovation.
Establish the role your innovation team will play within your organization.
What does innovation mean to you?
By definition, innovation means the use of a new idea or method. However, the word innovation has become a buzzword that’s thrown around with any mediocre technological improvement. It’s often confused with technological advancements, creativity, and disruption. First, determine how you will personally define innovation.
Michelle Risinger at Rising Solutions defines innovation as a unique, or novel idea that creates new business value or social impact. It is important to make the distinction between incremental improvements and truly novel and original ideas that have the potential to grow business, drive revenue, and provide value. Without a shared organizational definition of innovation, many companies fall into the trap of conflating incremental improvements with true novelty, business value, and competitive advantage. When it comes to true innovation—the kind that changes systems and creates new value—it usually feels uncomfortable. If it doesn’t, then you might be resorting to incremental improvements or what we call optimization.
What does innovation mean in your organization?
Now that you have your own personal understanding of innovation, it’s time to establish the role of innovation in your organization. There are several techniques to do so. You can even start with some desk research. Look up what your organization’s goals and values are. What does its online presence display as far as values, mission, and future goals? Consider asking questions like ‘do we have a stated mission that includes innovation?’ What are our values and future goals? Some tangential values that often arise in innovative cultures include curiosity, quality, trust, and creativity to name a few. Florence Navarro, the founder of Kichocheo, considers a thirst for learning, collaboration, and willingness to experiment and learn from failure, or humility, core qualities in an innovative culture. Read more about how to create an innovative culture in this Forbes article and if needed, reach out to the leadership at your organization and ask them if innovation is a priority.
What is the function of an innovation team?
Karen Reijnen emphasizes the importance of understanding the distinction between the two functions of an innovation team. They include…
Driving disruptive innovation
Driving a culture of innovation
To drive disruptive innovation you need people who are ready to develop new programs, products, and services. These people don’t care about going against the norm. They are champing at the bit to find the next best improvement or outside-of-the-box idea that will change the world.
To drive a culture of innovation in the whole organization, you also need people who are great facilitators and connectors. These folks can test new ideas, champion the great ones, and communicate the value of innovation to the larger organization.
II. Understand Your Innovation Effort
It can be challenging to find innovative talent when you don’t have a clear goal or focus for your efforts. Or, maybe you have a goal but don’t know what will be required of the team. We’ve laid out the following considerations as you begin thinking about the roles you’ll need to fill on your innovation team.
Wait, there are different kinds of innovation?
People, processes, and products all feed into the innovations your organization can produce. Each of these three elements is imperative for a successful business or innovation effort. For example, even if you have a successful product and the right people on board, without an innovative process your best people will eventually become frustrated and move on.Monica H. Kang, Founder, and CEO of InnovatorsBox® made this point during our Hiring for Higher Impact Webinar. We tend to overemphasize product innovation and underestimate the power of process and people innovation. Investing in your people provides a pathway for process and product innovation in a way that is often underutilized. Investing in your people could mean taking the time to set up 1:1 meetings to get to know your team better. It could also mean setting up a week-long retreat to build team culture or even something as simple as taking the time to ask how each team member is feeling at the start of a meeting. If you want to learn more check out these free InnovatorsBox® resources.
Diversity, diversity, diversity
Innovation thrives when diverse individuals, ideas, and perspectives come together. Effective innovation requires a diverse team. When we say diverse we don’t just mean ethnically. We are really talking about diversity of thought. Ideally, you should also include the perspectives of your end users or customers. According to Karen Reijnen, diversity is very important for an effective innovation team. To build new impactful programmes or services, you need many different perspectives: system thinkers, service designers, creatives and business-minded people. At a global company like the Rainforest Alliance, she has also intentionally hired people from different geographic regions where the organization operates, resulting in a very strong and diverse team.
III. Find the Essential Innovation Characteristics
Sorry, there’s no simple answer to who you should hire for your innovation team. But, according to Monica, there are some key characteristics that are a common thread among all innovators. The qualities of being coachable, curious, courageous, resilient, creative, optimistic, and empathetic are all essential. Unlike “hard” skills like data analysis, or computer programing, these soft skills can’t be so easily taught. That is why it’s essential for you to search them out. Now, the question is how? You can look in-house for these skills, consider the Basadur profile, and ask the right questions during interviews to search for these essential qualities.
Mindset + Attitude + Drive = A Unicorn 🦄
Look for unicorns. They’re coachable, self-aware, and optimistic. But, they are also elusive and hard to find because it’s uncommon for an individual to embody all of these characteristics. That is why it’s so important to have a balanced innovation team comprised of individuals who all contribute with their unique skills and perspectives.
The Basadur profile
According to Michelle Risinger, The Basadur Profile provides a framework for the suite of skill sets required for a balanced innovation team. The four profiles include…
Generators - like to brainstorm and share ideas. They tend to ask things like, “what if” and, “how might we?”
Conceptualizers - like to mull over ideas, find the best one and develop it further. They tend to ask things like “how would this work” and, “what would it look like in practice?”
Optimizers - like to make process changes and improvements. They tend to ask, “how can we make this better?”
Implementers - want to get it done! They don’t want to talk about these ideas and want to get the work done. They are essential for the success of a project. We all know how common it is for an idea or project to fail due to its failed implementation.
How can we do this better?
Asking “how can we do this better” is at the core of innovation. As a business leader, it is important to notice and listen to your employees–especially the ones who are asking questions and seeking out professional development opportunities. Notice and look for innovation everywhere. Your next big innovative idea might come from a sales rep or even a software developer. Remember, you don’t necessarily need to find an outside hire for your innovation team. Monica H. Kang suggests that you develop your noticing and listening skills so you can identify when these characteristics are right under your nose. Ask questions like…
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
What are your interests?
What are you looking forward to in your work?
Persistence in the face of resistance
According to Karen, innovation is a field where you will face lots of resistance. Change is difficult and requires individuals who are driven to persist and follow through with an idea in the face of resistance. When you interview candidates, start with questions that determine how a person deals with resistance. What is their personal resilience and how do they shepherd others through change? You’re looking for how people stay positive, optimistic, and resilient when faced with adversity and frustration. Ask the following questions to determine how a candidate might react to resistance…
Tell me about a time when you had a particularly challenging problem to solve.
Can you give me an example of a time when you dealt with resistance to change?
How did you react to the resistance and what was the result?
How do you like to receive feedback?
What would you do if someone said no to an idea you think would change the world?
We hope this guide helps you develop innovation initiatives and build a culture of innovation at your organization.
Happy innovating,
Florence, Michelle, Monica, and Karen
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About our contributors
Florence Navarro is the founder of Kichocheo, which means catalyst in Swahili. The company helps social impact and mission-driven organizations hire the talent they need for their current stage of growth. Her global work with social impact incubating programs and women entrepreneurs since 2008 informs how she supports hiring the best talent in a context of resource constraint. Her clients and her team share a love of lifelong learning, which is key to innovation.
Michelle Risinger is the Founder and Principal of Rising Solutions, a boutique innovation consulting firm in Washington, DC focused on social impact, Michelle had a unique introduction to innovation. After working as a civilian embedded in the army she began to ask about different ways to do humanitarian work. This led her to explore a bottom-up innovation approach, design-thinking and become the first innovation officer for the global development non-profit Pact in the fall of 2013.
Monica H. Kang is the Founder and CEO of InnovatorsBox® and author of Rethink Creativity: How to Innovate, Inspire and Thrive at Work. Monica is on a mission to make creative and inclusive workplaces accessible for all. When she felt stuck in her dream job in nuclear weapon security and international affairs, she learned that what helped her re-love her job was rekindling her creative mindset and understanding how psychological safety in the workplace can be built. Yet, among innovation leaders and entrenched in workplace culture she noticed a lack of access and a misunderstanding of joy and purpose at work. This set her on a mission to help people find their full purpose and joy at work. Today at InnovatorsBox she works with executives and global teams on leadership, innovation, and culture development to build workplaces for all.
Karen Reijnen is the Director of Innovation at the Rainforest Alliance, Karen worked as a consultant in the development industry assisting companies with their sustainability strategies. She became frustrated as the solutions she was seeing weren’t sufficient for existing and future problems. Now she has set up an innovation team within the Rainforest Alliance that develops new impactful solutions and supports the organization to innovate more effectively.