In the real world, innovative business ideas don’t simply spring to life. They require sound planning and heavy lifting. And, according to Chris Trimble, one of the key components required to birth complex innovation projects, for companies large or small, is to develop an innovation team.
Trimble is coauthor of four best-selling business books on innovation, the fruit of more than a decade of studying the best practices for making innovation happen in established organizations. Creating an innovation team is 
important, says Trimble, because “you don’t get breakthrough innovation without a little bit of breakthrough organizational design.”
Trimble, a faculty member of the business school at Dartmouth College, discussed with Travel Weekly PLUS Editor in Chief Diane Merlino how to set up and manage an innovation team in your company. This is the second excerpt from their dialogue on executing innovation.
Merlino: You often talk about the importance of building the right innovation team. Can you give us some practical pointers on that?
Trimble: Yeah, happy to. I'd like to qualify the answer just a little bit because there are some innovation initiatives that do not require the team model that I'm about to describe. These include real small projects that can be handled more or less within the slivers of slack time that exist within an organization. If you can get it done in your spare time, or maybe with the help of three or four other people in their spare time, you don't need the team model.
And you don’t need the team model if you have a new product development process that is designed to bring out this year's version of last year's product again and again and again — think of automakers bringing out the 2013 model, the 2014 model, the 2015 model. They have a very rigorous process for doing that on time and efficiently every year.
When you get beyond the limitations of these two processes, you need a very specific kind of team. And the team structure that you need is always a partnership between two groups — I’ll call them the dedicated team and the shared staff.
The dedicated team, as the name implies, is a small group of people that is fully dedicated to just one innovation project. The shared staff supports that innovation project but also retains its responsibilities for day-to-day operations. This is a partnership that has to be managed quite carefully because there's always conflict between the two groups.
Merlino: How can that inherent conflict in an innovation team be handled?
Trimble: Senior managers have to remain involved in simply adjudicating the conflicts that always come up between the shared staff and the dedicated team. Another key aspect of making this work is being very careful about what you ask the shared staff to do. It really can only handle tasks that fit very naturally within its existing processes and its existing roles, responsibilities, and workflows. Anything outside of that tends to get squeezed out because of the demands of day-to-day operations.
So, we want to be very careful about what we ask the shared staff to do. They can do more work if you staff them properly, but they can't do very different work. Everything else goes over to the dedicated team, and the key to making that dedicated team thrive is to build it as though you're building a new company from the ground up.
Merlino: The internal innovation team is structured like a new company?
Trimble: You have very little flexibility on the shared staff side, but you have — at least in theory — infinite flexibility on the dedicated team side. You can bring in people who have new areas of expertise from outside the organization. You can create a new organizational structure. You can define new roles and responsibilities. In fact, all of that is very important to do.
One of the axioms that we highlight in our book is that you simply don't get breakthrough innovation without a little bit of breakthrough organizational design. You can't do that in the shared staff because of their responsibilities for day-to-day operations, but you can do that in the dedicated team.
Merlino: Who inside the company generally selects the members of the innovation team, dedicated and shared?
Trimble: There’s usually one leader who is most responsible for the innovation initiative as a whole, and that leader ought to have all the flexibility needed to build the dedicated team. Where things get a little bit trickier is in the shared staff, in negotiating what expectations you have from the shared staff and making sure that the shared staff is adequately resourced to do both of its jobs.
Yesterday, it was just day-to-day operations; today, it's all that plus this new innovation project. Navigating that requires additional support, usually from a senior sponsor, and also from the line managers that run the day-to-day business.
Merlino: Where have you found that companies tend to go wrong in structuring the team or supporting the team after it's been established?
Trimble: The most common error that companies make in building the dedicated team is to build what we call in the book ‘a little performance engine.’ By that we mean a little team that operates just like the rest of the company. It’s 
very easy to stumble into this trap if you're not careful, especially if you choose for the dedicated team a bunch of insiders that have worked together for a long time.
Because with the dedicated team you're trying to build something from scratch, from the ground up, but if you bring in a bunch of insiders it’s hard to escape the fact that they already have long-established work relationships with each other. There's definitely a hierarchy that's already in place, and it's very difficult to overturn those understandings of who's responsible for what, who has power, and so forth.
Merlino: What's your suggestion for avoiding that trap in developing the innovation team?
Trimble: The most important thing you can do is so simple, and that is to bring in a few outsiders on the dedicated team. Let me put it this way: I get nervous when I hear about dedicated teams that have less than one in four [members] coming in from the outside.
Outsiders are just natural catalysts in the very important process of breaking down what exists and then building something new, because they don't know anybody, they don't have any established work relationships, and they have a history of success and failure that probably doesn't match up with what people have experienced inside the company. All of this is very healthy for a dedicated team.
Merlino: What are some other suggestions for building an effective innovation team?
Trimble: You can also take some very simple steps, like creating new titles and new job descriptions for everyone on the dedicated team. This may sound like just paperwork, but the title is actually a lot more powerful than just a couple of words on a business card.
If you meet somebody in a big company and they give you their title, before they say anything else you already have a pretty good idea of what they're responsible for and how powerful they are. If they give you a title that you've never heard of before, that starts what turns out to be a very productive conversation for a dedicated team: "Oh gee, what exactly does that mean? What is your role?"
And those are exactly the kinds of conversations that should be happening on dedicated teams. I've jokingly told dedicated teams they ought to make up crazy titles, like Imperial Marketing Wizard, or something like that. Anything that is sufficiently wacky and different that it starts those very important conversations.
Merlino: Do most companies have these innovation teams Chris? Are they more common to certain industries, or based on the size of the company?
Trimble: What I can tell you is that far too often companies try and proceed without one and discover the hard way it doesn't work. As soon as you say "dedicated team" the almost immediate reaction is, "Yeah, it'd be nice if we could do it," or "It's too expensive." And if you just give this a little bit of thought, it's just crazy right off the bat to have that objection.
If you are committed to an innovation initiative that requires — let's just say for the sake of argument — 50 person-weeks of work, does it really matter whether it's five people working full-time for 10 weeks or 25 people working part-time? It's the same number of person-weeks either way. The problem is the full-time team is going to 
be a very visible expense. It's going to show up on somebody's P&L. Somebody's going to have to approve it.
So it's tough to get dedicated teams. But when I have an innovation leader come to me and say, "I've got a great idea, and I'm thinking of proceeding despite the fact I can't get the dedicated team yet," I tell them flat-out, "Don't do it. It's not worth it. If your company's serious about this initiative, it'll form the dedicated team."
Merlino: Is all of this specific to larger companies, like the Fortune 500 companies that you've worked with, Chris? Or does the size of the company matter?
Trimble: Everything we have written about applies to established companies, not to startups, but an established company could be 20 people.
I've talked to small business owners, and this comes up all the time: "How can I afford to create a dedicated team?" And what I say is, "Given the innovation initiative you just outlined, you have no choice. If don't have the money, you go to the bank; you do what you did to start your company in the first place. You go find the resources, and then you create the dedicated team. Otherwise this innovation isn't for you. You can do more incremental projects, but unless you find the resources to create a dedicated team, there's no point in going any further."
Merlino: You talk about managing a disciplined experiment where the innovation team can test assumptions and then act on what they learn. Why is that important to the process of innovation?
Trimble: One of the big innovation challenges, especially for big companies that have a real strong culture of accountability, is that there's no room for failure. If you get a plan approved and you've got some specific numbers in it, you better deliver or you're judged a failure. Inside the core business that's been established for a long time, and where you can pretty reliably predict outcomes, this is a very sensible way to manage. But innovation just isn't like that.
Unfortunately, what people have tended to do is go to the opposite extreme. They've made ridiculous statements like, "Hey, it should be completely okay to fail." That's way too far in the other direction. We do need to be able to hold innovation leaders accountable, and in a very disciplined way. We need to be very tough on them, but we need to change the criteria by which we evaluate them.
It's not "Did you or did you not deliver on the plan?" It's "Did you or did you not run a very disciplined experiment." The types of questions that you ask as the reviewing senior executive of the innovation leader to assess whether or not they've run a disciplined experiment sound like: Did you have a clear hypothesis? Did everybody on your team understand what that hypothesis was? Did you identify the most critical unknowns and try and resolve them as quickly as possible? Did you accept and adapt to unexpected occurrences or unfavorable outcomes?
If you do this well, it is very tough and demanding on innovation leaders, and it gets you better outcomes. It doesn't guarantee you success, of course, but if you fail, you will get a quick and cheap failure, not a long, painful, and expensive one.
Merlino: The evaluation criteria you outlined — a clear hypothesis, identifying and resolving unknowns, adapting to unfavorable outcomes — sound almost scientific in approach.
Trimble: That's right. At the foundation of what we're prescribing is indeed the scientific method. We should have a hypothesis; we should make predictions in advance; we should measure; we should compare predictions to outcomes; and then on the basis of that analysis assess our lessons learned.
I think that when you start talking about the scientific method it can bring back some awful memories of high school chemistry. It also gives the impression that it's possible to have the same rigor in the business world as you would have in a laboratory, which of course is not possible.
In most business experiments, you can't be sophisticated to the same degree that is expected in an academic journal where you're talking about skewed sample sets and stuff like that, stuff that scientists take great pride in their knowledge of.
But you can expect business people to lay out a theory and test it using the best data they can get, and to at least have good conversations about which of their assumptions actually seem to be playing out as correct assumptions and which ones seem to be playing out as failures. With business, you're not going to be conclusive. But you can certainly have much better conversations if you follow the basic outline of the scientific method.
ALSO SEE: Chris Trimble on Executing Innovation: That Fabulous Idea Is Just the Start