Why do people believe you can build an innovation team by hiring a few smart people and giving them a creative space? In my experience, teams built on this false premise die within eighteen months. How do organizations get it so wrong? Innovation consultants have told them, or innovation books have taught them, that this is how you build an innovation team. Those experts have rarely built and led innovation teams that delivered. So why is this episode any different? I built and ran HP's Innovation Program Office (IPO), and the teams I led there were named to Fast Company's Most Innovative list three years running. For the last fourteen years, I've run CableLabs, the research and innovation lab for the global broadband industry, where our teams build technology that half a billion people use every day. This episode is about what it takes to build innovation teams, based on my experience doing it at scale—multiple times. By the end, you'll have the six steps I use, in the order they have to happen, what goes wrong when a team skips one, and a way to score your team today. I'll start with a decision I almost got wrong. In 2007, I was about to approve a 20 percent time policy at HP. Under what is called "20 percent time", employees spend about one day a week, a fifth of their working hours, on projects of their own choosing. Google had made it famous; everyone was talking about it, and it looked like the answer. Chuck House stopped me. Chuck had spent decades at HP working for Dave Packard, who founded the company with Bill Hewlett. "Before you do anything," he said, "you need to talk to Art." Art Fong was HP employee number nine. When I sat down with him, he told me something I didn't know. HP had already tried 20 percent time. In the 1950s. The company had watched Art work on his own ideas on Friday afternoons, so it gave everyone Friday afternoons. Most people sat around not knowing what to do with the time, and HP dropped it. "The ones who were going to innovate, like me, were already doing it," Art told me. "The mandate didn't change behavior." That was the lesson. You can't order people to innovate. The people who will innovate are already trying, and your job is to find them and clear the way. I never approved the policy. Google killed its "20% time" policy in 2013. What Art told me next shaped every innovation team I built after that, and we'll keep coming back to Art and his story. Let's get into it. The Innovation Team Fallacy The innovation team fallacy is the belief that if you hire smart people and give them a creative space, innovation will follow. It's easy to believe, because every successful innovation team you've read about had smart people and a place to work. That's the part you can see from the outside. What you can't see is what had to be in place before the work began. There's a second version of it, and it's the mistake I almost made with 20 percent time: copying what worked at another company and expecting it to work at yours. I'll come back to that later, with the story of a company that learned it the hard way. Teams also fail when you build the pieces in the wrong order. Get the order wrong, and it doesn't matter how talented the people are. Here are the six steps, in the order they have to happen: Build the culture before you hire anyone Recruit for specific roles, not just talent Adapt the process, don't adopt someone else's Fund it like innovation, not like operations Measure what keeps leadership bought in Lead it day to day Step 1: Build the Culture Before You Hire Anyone Culture is how people behave when nobody is telling them what to do, especially when something goes wrong. New hires don't learn it from what you say, or from the employee handbook. They learn it from what they see. Art Fong didn't describe HP's culture with a policy. He taught me through stories. One weekend, Bill Hewlett found a manager had locked the tool room with a padlock. Bill came back with bolt cutters, cut the lock off, and left a signed note on the door: "Never lock this again." He wanted his engineers to get to parts and equipment whenever an idea hit them. The note told every engineer at HP that the founders would remove anything that stood between them and their next idea. When Art tried to buy a house in Palo Alto, and discrimination stood in the way, Bill and Dave bought it from the seller themselves and sold it to him. No memo or values poster builds that kind of trust. It's built by what leaders do. Three things have to be in place before you hire your first person. Permission to fail without penalty. Innovation means working on ideas that are too early, too unusual, or too risky for the company's normal processes. Most of them won't work, and nobody brings you ideas like that if failure costs them. People watch what happens to the first person whose project gets stopped. If that person's next performance review takes a hit, your team stops proposing anything that might fail. Trust built through integrity. Trust gets built when a leader does the costly thing they didn't have to do. It gets destroyed when a leader says one thing and does another. Leadership that protects the team from the rest of the organization. Every company has its own version of that padlock: approval chains, purchasing rules, a legal review that takes six weeks, a budget that only opens once a year. Most of them exist to protect the core business, and they do that job well. An innovation team can't work inside them. What to do: List the padlocks, then remove them. Take one idea and walk it through your organization on paper, from the first conversation to the first test with a customer. Write down every approval, every form, where the money comes from, and how many days each one takes. Then go back through and cut the ones your team doesn't need. Write what happens to a person whose project gets stopped. Do it before the first project, not after, and be specific about the performance review and the next assignment. Then keep your word the first time it's tested, because that's the one everybody remembers. Name the protector, and make sure everyone knows who it is. Pick the person with enough authority to tell the rest of the organization that a rule doesn't apply to this team. If nobody in your organization can play that role, you're not ready to build the team. Go deeper: HP Won Innovation Awards. Then Killed What Made It True. Step 2: Recruit for Specific Roles, Not Just Talent Keep the team small. I've argued for years that the right size for an innovation team is six to eight people. Bigger than that, and people lose focus and stop feeling connected to the work. Small means every seat matters. If you hire the eight smartest people you can find, you'll often end up with eight people who think alike. I look for four roles, and in my postmortems of teams that failed to innovate, they were missing at least one. The visionary. This is the person who sees an idea before there's any evidence for it. They're rare, and often hard to work with, because they're living in a future the rest of the company can't see yet. The leader, who usually isn't the visionary. This is the most common mistake I see. Somebody has a great idea, so they get put in charge. The leader's job is different: get the resources, protect the team, and stop a project when the evidence says it's time. The person who had the idea is the worst person to make that call to kill it. The evangelist. The evangelist takes the team's work to the rest of the organization and explains it in the language of the people who will have to build it, sell it, or support it. Without one, a team builds good things that nobody adopts. The radicals. These are the people a normal hiring process screens out. They're creative, they push back, and they can drive the people around them crazy. Remember what Art said: the ones who were going to innovate were already doing it. Your radicals are often inside your company right now, working on something nobody asked them to do. At HP, my group became known as the place you could send your radicals. One of them was very creative, and he drove people crazy, especially the other executives. Every week, a senior executive called me to ask if I had fired him yet. I refused, and I spent a fair amount of time running interference so he could keep working. When he left HP, he started a company with some contacts. When it was acquired, he was worth several times what any executive at HP was worth. The person the organization wants gone is often the one with the idea nobody else can see yet. If you want radicals on your team, you have to be willing to take those calls. What to do: Write the four roles on one page and put a name beside each. Use the names of real people, not job titles. Any blank is your first hire, and it tells you what to recruit for. Keep the visionary and the leader as two different people. If one person holds both roles today, decide which one they're better at and fill the other. The test is simple: can this person stop a project they fell in love with? Choose the evangelist from the part of the business that will have to adopt the work. Their credibility with that group matters more than their innovation experience, because those people already trust them. Give the evangelist standing time with that group, not just a presentation at the end. Go find your radicals, and decide in advance how you'll protect them. Ask managers who they would transfer out, and look for the people already working on something nobody asked for. Then agree with your own boss on what you'll say when the complaints start. Skip this step, and you get a team that produces what the core business would have produced anyway, or one that builds good work nobody adopts. Go deeper: What Is the Optimal Innovation Team Size? Step 3: Adapt the Process, Don't Adopt Someone Els
