Setting Up a Quick-Turn Innovation Team – Part 2
Part 2: Training, Tools and Support
In the first blog post of this series we covered some basic things to consider when putting together a quick-turn innovation team to address a specific challenge. After you select your team, provide that team with training and tools and ensure they have the support they need to be successful.
Providing Training and Tools:
- Training a whole company on innovation can be a daunting task (although an important one!). It is usually easier to work with this smaller team first. Two things should be taught: how to diagnose the challenge at hand and how to use various techniques to innovate around the challenge.
- We have found pop-up innovation labs to be useful for these quick-turn teams and challenges. A pop-up innovation lab is essentially a box of tools and exercises teams can use to ideate at any time, designed to provide some structure to the idea generation process. There are also exercises for vetting ideas when the time is right. The lab doesn’t require designated office space and includes online tools as well as tips and tricks on how to use virtual tools when collaborating remotely.
Ensuring Support:
For teams to be successful, whatever their mission, they need leadership support. This support is even more critical for innovation teams, as they will be breaking through standard organizational beliefs and challenging the status quo. The team needs to know it is ok, actually more than ok—expected, that they challenge each other and push to come up with the truly different ideas. So when the team is met with resistance, at any level in the organization, leaders should reiterate why the team was formed in the first place and the value of new ideas. To be successful, a quick-turn innovation team needs to know that their ideas will be respected and considered.
Setting up your quick-turn innovation team should get you closer to tackling that challenge that needs some laser-like innovation focus. We love chatting with people about the innovation challenges they face in the workplace – if you have a challenge that you’d to talk through reach out to me at anne@clearworks.net and we can set up a call.
Be sure to check out Part 1 of this series if you have not already!
Anne Bakstad
anne@clearworks.net
