Last year I wrote a post about getting multidisciplinary teams right. I’ve recently been asked to speak about building teams for innovation and put together this slide that elaborates on the ideas I wrote about. Later I’ll get into more detail about selecting the right people to work on innovation teams, but for now I’ll just say that in my opinion, the most important differences between people who naturally fit better in innovation teams, vs development teams, are these: People who are successful working in innovation teams (in this case I called it Opportunity Definition Teams), have a problem-posing mindset, as opposed to a problem-solving mindset. They also are synthesizing information and drawing connections between seemingly unrelated disciplines and ideas. Problem solving mindsets favor analyzing information, and breaking down problems into manageable parts.
