Team composition is a critical success factor when developing a new innovation. Many initiatives go off target before they even start because the team members were misaligned from the beginning. I remember, on one occasion, meeting with the Chief Digital Officer of a mid-sized hospital system who lamented  that his big ideas always ended up smaller and less impactful. He blamed the outcomes on the process, but as we will see, the root cause was actually team composition. More recently, I had coffee with the CEO of a medical startup that was developing a solution for running patient drug trials. She shared that her team was enthusiastic about their solution, however, when they would do investor pitches, the concepts tended to flop under pressure. Why was this, she asked? 

These two examples highlight the trouble that innovation teams get into, but also provide clues to the path forward. When we are faced with building a team to solve complex problems, we have our “go-to” methods for team selection. Whether based on comfort, familiarity, or falling back on what has always been done, it is easy to default to certain groupings, even if the mix of members isn’t quite right. The least impactful tends to be the “friends and family” team that comprises work pals, even if they may not have the right blend of skills for the task at hand. Team members in this arrangement often have thinking profiles that resemble the team leader, and therefore don’t offer much in the way of differentiated problem solving. 

Many organizations erect cross-functional teams, which are composed of team members across a range of disciplines, so you have a blend of perspectives at the table. While variety can bring diversified solutions, this tactic can also fall short because it doesn’t take into account the creative or critical needs of advanced problem-solving. Still, other organizations assemble teams based solely on skills or expertise. These tend to be tilted toward a group of individuals who are so skilled in their particular field that their biases and critical filters can be insurmountable, which may also lead to suboptimal outcomes. An example of this frequently occurs in healthcare, where we often see a technology bias in innovation, which creates an invisible barrier and can stall out innovation. 

To explore teams more deeply, and how best to assemble them to achieve your innovation goals, we can begin by looking at the types of innovations that bring teams together.