Six years ago,
It’s also crucial to establish an autonomous and scalable innovation team that will help achieve desired business results.
Building one goes beyond just hiring experienced individuals; it demands strategic vision, a systematic approach, resilience, a clear understanding of limitations, a focus on business value, and a culture of innovation.
In this article, I’ll share best practices for successful innovation onboarding, candidate selection, and more aspects to consider to build a high-performing team.
Why Do Enterprises Build Innovation Teams?
Innovation often comes with built-in risks, including different errors, and time and money investments. Establishing an innovative culture becomes a perfect solution to maintain cost efficiency and reduce the uncertainties related to the innovation process.
Forward-looking enterprises often choose to assign innovative initiatives to vendors with proven experience in onboarding innovations, establishing
They look for partners capable of handling responsibilities and risks across the entire project scope, from assessing feasibility to building a scalable innovation ecosystem and delivering the final project.
Additionally, an experienced technology partner can evaluate the company's current situation and business goals and create a process definition document to find areas that need improvement.
How to Choose the Right Innovation Candidate
In my experience, it is important to outline ideal innovation scenarios, assess and rank potential risks, including dependencies that might affect the process, and deliver a proof of concept (PoC) to show the expected benefits and outcomes.
Selecting an innovation candidate is the next objective which usually consists of 2 stages.
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First, you should pick a candidate or a group of candidates for PoC/PoV to understand the strengths and limitations of each. The top-priority candidates are those capable of providing the greatest
ROI and productivity gains while requiring minimal complexity in execution, aligned with the company's existing operational framework, and promoting a reliable and resilient process. -
The second stage involves selecting one candidate that offers a balance between complexity, ROI, and impact. The ideal initial candidate should deliver maximal value while demanding moderate effort and resources from the enterprise.
A Plan to Build an Innovation Team
You can start building the innovation CoE team with 6-10 people and scale along the growing needs. But defining the team members’ persona should be your top priority from the start.
Describe the Innovation Team Member’s Persona
Remember that soft skills are just as vital as technological expertise; you not only need a candidate with a rare skillset but also someone with specific traits. I usually look for specialists with diverse backgrounds who are passionate about technology and unafraid of making mistakes.
I also appreciate individuals with reasonable doubts who can evaluate their ideas before implementation to avoid unnecessary reworks.
There’s also a challenge in finding team members with rare skills. For example, when I was establishing an RPA innovation center 6 years ago, there were few people familiar with this technology in the market. That’s why I prefer candidates with a broad skillset rather than deep expertise in a specific technology now.
The more skills a person has, the more likely they are to acquire relevant knowledge for your needs. They know how to research and explore new approaches to achieving project goals and can learn from core members along the way.
Form a Team
While the team may expand significantly over time, it's crucial to first fill key roles in the core.
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Technical leader (architect). The main role of an architect is to validate innovation. They need to choose the best solution, find the best way to integrate it into the corporate ecosystem, and ensure adherence to workflow standards.
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Analyst/product owner. This person oversees project outcomes and the value delivered to the business. They assess the value of onboarding technology and ensure that the innovation is relevant to the business, easy to integrate, and user-friendly.
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Success manager. Their core responsibility is to manage communication between business needs and the innovation team. Success managers should align business expectations with the actual capabilities of a particular technology.
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Engineers. Engineers write features that meet the needs and expectations of end users. They choose the most effective approach to implementing a solution, design user interactions with the PoC, and create intuitive and user-friendly interfaces.
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Quality assurance engineers. Initially, their focus is on the quality of the PoC. They identify any defects or errors that may compromise functionality or performance, offer corrective measures to ensure the PoC operates smoothly, create improvement strategies, and envision ways to enhance the PoC's capabilities.
The team can grow with the innovation center's workload and include additional roles. For example, a more complex innovation team structure may look like this:
Establish Effective Leadership
A team leader plays a crucial role in guiding the direction, streamlining processes, addressing problem areas, and driving progress. However, this task is not straightforward.
Innovation is a dynamic process. Moreover, a team leader actively participates in hiring, interviewing, selecting, and onboarding candidates.
So, it’s important to take some time and thoroughly evaluate potential leaders through comprehensive observations, hackathons, and continuous feedback from employees and team members to find the best fit.
Build a Community
Each member of the
With knowledge-sharing practices in place, you will be able to expand your team easily. With a core of up to 10 people, adding new members to the innovation team becomes more manageable.
And even if they don't precisely match your technical expectations, they will quickly learn all the tricks and become valuable assets for your innovation team.
What Results Can You Achieve With an Innovation Team?
An innovation team or a dedicated center of excellence can help businesses achieve a higher gross profit margin over time. By consolidating innovative expertise and knowledge within the CoE, an enterprise can streamline processes, scale up, and establish lasting best practices.
This results in more efficient and cost-effective project delivery, ultimately leading to increased ROI.
Moreover, this unity fosters collaboration among team members and helps companies smoothly integrate technology initiatives into the overall business strategies, boosting cost-efficiency and helping them to make the most of innovation.