How to hire a head of innovation | Sifted

With the corporate landscape moving faster than ever — just look at the past 6 months for starters — a growing number of chief executives are hiring innovation teams. It makes sense to build up in-house capability to develop new business models and enter new markets.

But hiring an innovation leader and team is unlike hiring for other roles– they’re a completely different breed.

They are someone that can traverse the maze of corporate efficiency–see the big picture and play the chess game required to get things done–and, at the same time, have their hands inside all of the new ventures being created, be they corporate startups, acquisitions, or partnerships.

You’re looking for an entrepreneur with an accurate GPS of the corporate world.

Finding these profiles can be tricky because of their unique and diverse background, and the fact that many of the required skills are not taught at school, they come from experience.

Getting it wrong could also have detrimental consequences. An entrepreneur unused to navigating around extensive corporate bureaucracy can end up not building the right relationships to gain access to vital corporate assets. On the other hand, an innovation lead who has never worked in a startup environment will struggle with normalising failure as part of the process, and ultimately be too cautious.

How to do it

Over the years of helping companies hire for this role, we’ve picked up some insights and practices that might help.

Start by constructing a job description for your innovation lead, including these basics:

Recruitment in reality

Then you want to evaluate whether your candidates can really deliver. Throughout the process we test and challenge candidates for both their entrepreneurial skills and the ability to deal and cope with change. It’s also critical to make it clear to all candidates that the role is part of a large corporate and the challenge will be to navigate and manage important stakeholders.

This is a five-part challenge that we have developed over the years based on recruitment tracks at multiple corporations:

Challenges like these can give you a great sense for a candidate’s resourcefulness, creativity and specific abilities in areas like growth marketing and customer validation. In most cases, we add an eight-hour time limit to assess a candidate’s agility and ability to think on their feet.

Mixing the right profiles

Beyond the Innovation Lead, you need to have an objectives-based team to carry out your corporate goals. The industry-standard model of approaching this was created by McKinsey. We’ve adapted it to structure innovation teams:

Your corporate innovation team needs to be filled with various complementary profiles:

Additionally, many corporations have a team of intrapreneurs with a mixed skillset to help bring ventures to launch and to act as an interim startup team before recruitment takes place.

5 essential tips to build the right team

Here are some final insights we’ve gained that will help you build the right innovation team for your corporation:

A solid innovation lead has become one of the most sought after roles in the world today, and recruiting them is quite different from other traditional roles.

Getting this right will make all the difference in keeping your corporation on the forefront of its industry. The effort will pay dividends, literally.

Thomas van Halewyck is cofounder of Bundl.