How To Build Innovation Teams (My Playbook From HP and CableLabs)

Why do people believe you can build an innovation team by hiring a few smart people and giving them a creative space? In my experience, teams built on this false premise die within eighteen months.

How do organizations get it so wrong? Innovation consultants have told them, or innovation books have taught them, that this is how you build an innovation team. Those experts have rarely built and led innovation teams that delivered.

So why is this episode any different?

I built and ran HP's Innovation Program Office (IPO), and the teams I led there were named to Fast Company's Most Innovative list three years running. For the last fourteen years, I've run CableLabs, the research and innovation lab for the global broadband industry, where our teams build technology that half a billion people use every day.

This episode is about what it takes to build innovation teams, based on my experience doing it at scale—multiple times.

By the end, you'll have the six steps I use, in the order they have to happen, what goes wrong when a team skips one, and a way to score your team today.

I'll start with a decision I almost got wrong.

In 2007, I was about to approve a 20 percent time policy at HP. Under what is called "20 percent time", employees spend about one day a week, a fifth of their working hours, on projects of their own choosing. Google had made it famous; everyone was talking about it, and it looked like the answer.

Chuck House stopped me. Chuck had spent decades at HP working for Dave Packard, who founded the company with Bill Hewlett. "Before you do anything," he said, "you need to talk to Art."

Art Fong was HP employee number nine. When I sat down with him, he told me something I didn't know. HP had already tried 20 percent time. In the 1950s. The company had watched Art work on his own ideas on Friday afternoons, so it gave everyone Friday afternoons. Most people sat around not knowing what to do with the time, and HP dropped it.

"The ones who were going to innovate, like me, were already doing it," Art told me. "The mandate didn't change behavior."

That was the lesson. You can't order people to innovate. The people who will innovate are already trying, and your job is to find them and clear the way.