The Perfect Innovation Team

In my new book ‘The Innovation Expedition’ I love to refer regarding innovation teams to The Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation. The Mayo Clinic is a best-practice organization, which was researched in APQC’s Innovation: Putting Ideas into Action 2009 study. It favors a specific combination of personalities when it builds innovation teams.

The Mayo Clinic strives to include the following nine personality types when composing innovation teams:

1. The Visionary—The force behind creating the world as it could be-and should be.
2. The Generator—The generator of the idea that gets an innovation rolling.
3. The Iterator—An idea-engineer who takes the original idea and turns it into an innovation.
4. The Customer Anthropologist—The keen observer of what customers truly hunger for.
5. The Tech Guru—The harnesser of technology to turn the innovation into reality.
6. The Producer—The champion of flow. The master of moving ideas along.
7. The Communicator—Amplifies and clarifies the idea in the minds of others outside the team.
8. The Roadblock Remover—With a hammer- or velvet gloves- knocks away organization, political, and financial roadblocks.
9. The Futurecaster—The forecaster and modeler of the economic and social value of the future of innovation.

Does your innovation team fits the combination of these personalities?

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Gijs van Wulfen is a LinkedIn thought leader on innovation. He recently published : "The Innovation Expedition, A Visual Toolkit to Start Innovation". Available at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

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Photo Credits: Flickr / F. de Comite

Source: “Innovation: Putting Ideas into Action 2009 (Best Practices Report)”, APQC, Houston, USA.