Does this concept apply to innovation? Whether you look at start-ups fortunes and ‘lean start-up’ approach, spot the ‘2 Pizza team’ practiced by Amazon, or read the analysis by @scottdanthony about the ‘New Corporate Garage’ (‘catalysts using big company resources to develop solutions at global scale)’, status is clear: small teams are better at achieving breakthrough innovation.
Nervertheless smallness is not enough to succeed. How we can enhance the actions of small innovation teams, and support them in their progression is what we are tackling here.
Shaping deliverables in modular design mould, to unleash collaboration.
Assuming our innovation team performs, we might want to scale, pursuing multiple innovation tracks concurrently. How do we achieve consistency, crossfertilization, and overall efficency in the organization? Innovation portfolio and cooperative governance can help.
‘Balanced, inspired, staffed, dynamic, transparent, scalable’: that’s what your innovation portfolio should look like, as ‘a jewellery case to your innovation project’.
If innovation teams are well set, ‘they won’t feel like employees working for someone else, they will feel much more like belongers’ as Richard Branson descrives. A savy innovation portfolio is here to infuse a sentiment of ‘belonging’.
One could think of managing small independant innovation units like processing API: harnessing collaborative innovation, streamlining seamlessly community energies, building a whole connecting functional legos combining accurately individual parts, and initiating new service streams almost instantly by linking.