Swarm Vision Innovation Talent Blog

You've probably heard the stats: The failure rate for innovation projects is 80-90%. And behind every innovation project is...an innovation team.

You may sense this already, but perhaps you haven't quite put your finger on it yet. Why is that everybody builds innovation teams the same way as they do in the Core business, when innovation teams require such different skills and operate in a such different environments? We believe everybody builds innovation teams the wrong way, and that's why 90% of them fail.

Here's how most organizations form innovation teams today. Does this sound familiar?

• They select from available members.
• Assembling diverse functional skills relevant to the project.
• And if possible, include members from different parts of the organization.
  
• They may give more effort to diversity, and may use personality assessments. But while valuable for other reasons, neither one is associated with better business outcomes.

At Swarm we believe in innovation science, not innovation fairy tales. So we pointed our team of data scientists, behavior economists and developers at this problem statement:

Problem Statement:  How might we understand the team factors within our control and significantly improve the success rate of innovation projects?

When you find candidates who score in the desired Swarm Innovation Profiler range, use interviews to dig deeper into their motivations and behavior patterns. To prepare for such interviews, be sure to study this easy guide to the Eight Innovation Skills. Candidates don’t need to (and rarely will) have all of the eight skills and 26 sub-clusters. Look for candidates whose innovation skills can strengthen the team they will be joining.

And keep in mind that Interviews alone are not sufficient for diagnosing a candidate’s innovation skills. Why? Because: