Community Forum – What skills do we need as we expand our innovation team? 

A: What skills do we need as we expand our innovation team?

Please find below the responses to this week’s IRI Community Forum Survey. Thank you to those who took the time to add their input! 

A member company is looking to add to their team’s innovation capabilities and wants to understand the most critical skills for success. Please take a moment to help us identify which skills are most needed, how you acquire them, and what skills you think will be needed in the future.

Responses are below.

Community Responses

Other:

• Humility (knowing how ignorant you really are!)
• Systems thinking – seeing the big picture to identify the gaps and then innovate to fill them.
• Fluency with innovation specific mindset, process, tools

Other:

• Creative problem solving – internal; tech expertise – elsewhere; customer insight – internal
• Skill 1, 5, and the other in question 1 should be embedded, the rest can be borrowed
• Ability to guide and lead teams through innovation Lifecyle

Other:

• Patience of leaders to actually do innovation.
• Budget constraints that don’t allow the time for creative thinking
• Finding “innovators” with right mindset, creativity, perseverance

Comments:

• Also partnering with external companies that have the industry expertise needed to explore the innovations

Looking ahead, which skills do you believe will become even more critical for innovation teams in the next 3-5 years?:

• AI
• Use of AI in writing concepts.
• Data Analytics, Financial knowledge – how do the projects/products really make enough money to move a needle
• “Efficient, streamlined project management.
• Selecting the right projects to work on – those with a strong tie to market/customer needs have a high value proposition”
• Whole Systems thinking – needed for both identifying the correct gap(s) to leverage and ensuring that the innovations are sustainable.
• AI
• Use of AI to enable and enhance innovation capacity – for better efficiency and eventually impact.