Thought Experiment #6: Designing a virtual innovation team

This is the seventh article in our design your own 'virtual [  ] incubator' series. If you're in charge of making innovation happen inside your organisation, rather than just focusing on the idea, you should also help individual employees to form the right virtual teams. This relatively low-effort can yield substantial return-on-your-time.

In the very early stages, before you're even a internal startup or a new product line, you're just an idea, a hypothesis, or even a frustration. At this stage, it's very unlikely you or anyone else who you need to achieve traction, is going to leave their day jobs in return for very little. Yet, you know that innovating alone inside your organisation is going to be time-consuming and die a lonely-death. 

In our experience of having supported 50+ innovation teams, the success of your innovation depends less on the original creativity or potential of your idea, but more on the strength and proactive design of your virtual execution team and virtual advisory team. We define a virtual team member as someone who can offer at least 2-4 hours a week, every week, to your idea and can be located anywhere as the coming together can be over video calls. 

Why a virtual (part-time) team? Steven Blank (the father of lean startups) defines startup as a temporary organisation in search of a business model. With this in mind, at such early stages of customer development, we think it's important if the team composition should also be temporary. A virtual team if you will. 

Of course this may slow down the execution at this early stage, but that can be a good thing for a number of reasons:

- With limited time (as a designed constraint) it forces you to prioritise to search rather than scale one particular path.

- As soon as roles become permanent with respect to your innovation, your job depends on it so inevitably you become more solution-centered. This creates the pressure to choose one path too quickly to show some results, thus creates less room for failure and learning, and does not allow you to pivot (change course rapidly) without having to justify it to the nth degree. 

Virtual Execution Team

For ideas inside companies, you will need a virtual execution-team, that is self-forming, which may comprise of two or more of:

- frontline staff, or those who are closest to the problem or customers. Getting access to customers is time-consuming so someone who can connect, is fiercely customer-centric, understands customer preferences, customer challenges 

- product/engineering/design/service person, who can develop a pretotype or prototype fast - brings understanding of product capabilities.

- manager who can do the sales and marketing internally and externally, will take ownership of the idea if you decide to embed it/scale it back into the business units. The business unit person needs to be part of the innovation journey from day one. 'Handing over innovations' is very high risk strategy.

It can be helpful to put down a goal (for example, get first 10 customers) and then think of the virtual execution team that can help you best reach this goal. Of course the team composition will need to change depending on the life stage of your idea and goals required. 

Another way of looking at it, to get the innovation-job done fast and effectively, what are the key archetype personas you need on your team. For example - hustler, hacker, creative, designer, visionary, and collaborator. These roles can cover key activities, such as management, sales, and development. 

Virtual Advisory Team

These are a few suggestions of the different types of relationships you may want to cultivate and what value they should bring to you:  

A virtual co-founder is an innovation process expert, who has supported other similar stage ideas. Of course there is no one-successful way to innovate, but the paths to failure are well trodden and remarkably similar between different failed ideas. This virtual co-founder has worked with enough ideas to know these typical failure-points. In addition:

• The reason this person is a virtual co-founder is because he/she is there not to just advice but also execute with you in some small effort ways (e.g. with customer development scripts, creating value propositions, developing prototypes)
• Helps you not only form hypotheses, but also design their execution. For example, making sure you're asking the right questions. We see too many idea founders asking the wrong questions, then building the wrong thing, and then with customers not buying their solution they are left wondering why (more detail coming in separate article)
• Provides you personalised 'introductions' using their network or their network's network. These introductions help you advance (prove or disprove) your specific hypotheses 
• Highlights where you're on the path to failing, with brutal honesty
• Fiercely customer centric, and is not personally connected to your solution. Remind you to continuously fall in love with the problem, not the solution.
• Helping you connect the dots between all your new learning
• A strong business understanding on how to create a sense of urgency. As well as helping you focus on the 20% of activities that generate 80% of the value
• Helps to address your blind spots (for example developing the product without any training)
• Can hold you accountable to 'get shi* done' by 'getting out of the building'. After you get investment, your internal or external investors will take over this accountability
• Gives you permission to try and fail, and change fast

Coach is someone who has experience managing and delivering change through people. You are the springboard but also the biggest barrier to successful execution. Therefore, this coach needs to:

• Rather than coach you on your idea, he/she focuses on developing the mindsets of the different people in the virtual team. 
• Helps you best manage issues that come up with your team (co-founders, early stage employees, and relationships with senior execs).  
• Improve performance by adjusting the incorrect behaviours and habits.
• Hefty amount of honest feedback on your personal strengths and weaknesses. Push you outside your own personal comfort zone. 

Sponsor: Sponsors are people in positions of power who work on your behalf to:

• Clear obstacles 
• Assign higher-profile work to ease the move up the ranks
• Provide air-cover and support in case of stumbles
• Find ways to tell a broader story in how your work connects with the company strategy

Customer: This could be you be your very first customer (or user) that is representative of many other customers. This person can help you to understand: 

• How decisions are made by your customers and who makes them at what level.
• Where budgets are coming from and how to tap into them. 
• When is the right time to be in front of potential customers/users. 
• Which value you need to demonstrate to the different stakeholders.

Pre-investor: Cultivate someone who has the budget and/or investment potential in your idea. This person can help you to:

• Share how your ideas can connect with other industries or use-cases. You may have developed a product/solution that has failed with your target customer archetype, but could be ripe for a different customer segment.
• Optimising and scaling a working business (broaden your perspectives and horizons).
• Push your thinking on the business-model.
• Know people inside an industry that understand it and can help navigate it.

Finally, you will certainly get contradictory advice. As Vinod Khosla (Venture Capitalist) said “knowing which advice to take (and leave) is one of the most important jobs as a founder”. However by having a clear role, focus and reasons for having different advisors, it will ensure higher impact on you and your idea.