Elements of an Innovation Team | SF AppWorks

Collaboration requires buy-in from all stakeholders. If you have an idea or a concept and you want others to participate in the realization of it, you need to sell them on it. The first rationale for this is that people invest more in the success of an idea if they feel personally invested. Giving people a chance to ask questions, bring up counterpoints, and come to the same conclusions that you have creates buy-in. 

You also need to build support for your team externally so that you have the funding to keep doing what you are doing. Even if your product minds are working efficiently, churning out promising concepts that are ready for large-scale testing, you’ll need to convince people of this by showing them the results and the promise of your work. 

The process of selling also helps you articulate your value proposition and validate your effort. If, when you explain what you are doing, people don’t immediately see the value, you may need to go back and explore why. If they do see the value, do they also appreciate the effort needed to create that value? Say you want to build a Facebook chatbot to reduce customer service requests for your business. You’ll first need to convince the customer service team that Facebook chatbots can in fact reduce their workload, and not increase it. Assuming they buy-in, you’ll need to convince the finance people that spending 3 months building and testing these chatbots, then training people to use them, will save money in the long run. By articulating these points, you can see where your value proposition breaks down – if the chatbots take too long to build and/or don’t reduce customer service requests, it’s time to move on to the next idea.  

Innovation is strengthened by diversity of minds. When assembling a team, whether of 2 or of 20, open up a dialogue early about the different minds present at the table. Figure out your strengths and weaknesses, and which roles you believe you can fulfill with energy and enthusiasm. Then put that team to the test by brainstorming, which we will address in our next post.