Jacob Dutton breaks down staffing an innovation engine into three layers: a fixed core team with an operations leader, finance expert, and coordinator; a flexible pool of four roles including a customer-discovery specialist and systems architect that scales with new projects; and business resources drawn in as needed. He emphasizes continuous hiring and compensation beyond salary.
Chapters
Now, while we're talking about people, one of the things that always really surprises me is the way in which companies set up their corporate innovation teams. In essence, you should have a fixed team. So this is the minimum number of roles you should have full-time in your engine. You should have a flexible team. This is a resource that you can scale up and down depending on the number of new propositions you want to get through. And you should also have a core team, right? So those are roles that are provided by the existing business, sometimes at very specific junctures within the process. But in your fixed team, someone should be leading on operations, almost as like the, the COO to your CEO of the innovation engine. The second person that you need within this team is someone who has a really great finance mind. The final role that you really need to have is kind of an admin, you know, somebody who can work very closely with that COO, schedule, organize all the interface points between the engine, the core, your external partners. In flexible, there are 4 roles that you need. You need someone to undertake in-depth customer discovery and validation works. The second role that you need is someone to own each opportunity area that you're servicing, each idea that you're testing, each idea that you're scaling. You also need a designer. In fact, it's probably a little bit more full stack than design. You know, you need someone who makes things real. And the final role that we need in this flexible team is a systems architect. So you need someone who's capable of mapping out a blueprint for how a new proposition will work, whether that's physical or digital, and translating those blueprints into requirements and ultimately into a product backlog. And then from the core, really, there are 3 roles that I touch on. On a case-by-case basis, you're going to need some subject matter expertise. Could be, you know, an SME around products or, you know, specific markets. You'll need some form of IT support. And as I said, if you're remote, you know, you're going to need someone dedicated preferably. And finally, you should be doing an element of continuous hiring, right? And you'll need not just to source new talent, but also to onboard and retain them as well. So that's component number 5 of the engine. You've got to find or have access to all of the talent that you need, and you've got to compensate them beyond the traditional salary model and also create a documented process of finding recruiting and onboarding those team members.
