The Perfect Innovation Team

By: Gijs van Wulfen

In my new book ‘The Innovation Expedition’ I love to refer in discussions on 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 these descriptions?

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

By Gijs van Wulfen

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