"Starting a business together is like a marriage." "Innovation teams should be allowed to be prickly."
Sentences like these emphasize the importance of the composition of innovation teams or founding teams. But what is the right composition? We have been using the following recipe for around 10 years: X*T = success or expressed in words:
Cross-functional teams with T-shaped competent employees lead to increased success of the transformation / innovation project, the start-up.
What does this mean?
Cross-functional teams are teams made up of specialists from different functional areas. They contribute the expertise of their domain, area and function to the team. The combination of these different experts enables the inclusion of different perspectives on a project or for a start-up. This composition of the Teams in innovation management a role.
However, a mixture of different specialists is not necessarily enough to get things moving. This requires so-called t-shaped skills.
Accordingly, a T-shaped competence set is essential for employees in cross-functional teams. T - stands for the combination of deep knowledge / knowledge in a specific area and broad knowledge. Broad-based knowledge means the ability to engage in dialog, connectivity and abstractability. This enables employees to enter into dialog with various specialists, act in diverse situations, anticipate customer problems and transfer their own specialist knowledge.
In our MutOffensive podcast, we spoke to Christian Kastner about team building. Listen now (link)!
