Smart Innovators Value Smaller Teams Over Better Processes

Quiet but unsubtle innovation insurgencies are emerging in global enterprise. Instead of investing more in innovation process or cultural transformation, I'm observing more large organizations giving greater resources and responsibilities to ever-smaller teams. Innovation initiatives that were once handled by dozens a decade ago are now run by only handfuls. The median size of the core innovation group has dropped from a football/soccer eleven to a basketball five. Less apparently enables more.

This trend seems transcendent. GlaxoSmithKline CEO Andrew Witty publicly observes that the institutionalization and industrialization of the drug discovery process has hurt his industry. The pharma giant (the world's third largest) has de-scaled its research teams. "What we now have are labs with individuals in them, typically very small teams — the smallest is eight people and the biggest is 60, all in a lab, all mixed in together." GSK is betting that smaller size assures faster velocity and greater agility for innovation decision.

Facebook's Zuckerberg is a big champion of small teams. Likewise, the early Google super-charged its innovation engine by encouraging individuals and smaller groups alike to innovate hard and fast for top management review. Apple's Steve Jobs was notorious for insisting that focused innovation required focused teams. Linear Technology is also a high-impact, small niche player in a capital-intensive industry that leverages the small exceptionally well.

There's nothing novel about this "smaller is beautiful" innovation mindset. Kelly Johnson's pioneering Skunk Works at Lockheed during the 1950s offers a world-class example. "The Mythical Man-Month" — Fred Brooks' classic 1975 treatise on the pragmatics of software development — identified many of the pathologies associated with making teams larger as innovation deadlines loom. But it's also true that many organizations bidding to become more innovative have invested extraordinary time and effort in creating processes and cultures that have made teams enablers, rather than the top-management focus of their innovation investments. Because so many large organizations must coordinate so many silos — and simultaneously scale and customize their innovation offerings — team sizes relentlessly drift upward. A nucleus of seven can easily leap an order of magnitude to 70+ within six months if certain milestones are hit. That's bad.

I increasingly see resistance from team leaders and top-management alike to allow innovation teams to grow anything but incrementally. They work very hard to stay very small. Even top-tier talent is turned aside or denied. The emphasis has shifted from "how do we successfully scale the team?" to "how do we successfully scale the team's influence and deliverables?" Instead of seeing an explosion of virtual teams, what's emerged are teams cleverly using digital and social media to extend their reach both inside the enterprise and out. Key suppliers and channels are contacted on an "as needed" basis. More innovative technology minimizes the need to add more people to the main team.

These intermediated colleagues aren't seen or treated as "teammates," but as a support resource for the hard core. If this sounds a bit exploitive, perhaps it is. The organizational priority is making innovation processes and culture subservient to the small teams rather than making small teams serve the innovation process. I'm even watching innovation cultures deconstruct into innovation "cults" where the team needs to powerfully influence top management perception. Is that healthy? That depends on how well the team leaders align with C-suite innovation vision and values.

The key performance indicator here is, ironically, slow growth. A fast-growing innovation team means either the wrong people were hired or that the wrong challenge was picked. The team delivers measurably impressive results with only marginally more members. That is the success metric. Empire-building is out; remarkably "lean and mean" is in. One clearly sees principles of both the "agile" and "XP" software development sensibilities in this. Those are methodologies where principles clearly trump process as the innovation driver.

I don't know if "going small to get big" defines large enterprise innovation going forward. But tight teams are growing in innovation power and influence, if not size. Take a very, very good look at your organization's innovation teams. Would they do better with a few more folks? Or could they do much, much more with less?

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MICHAEL SCHRAGE

Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business, is the author of Serious Play and the forthcoming Getting Beyond Ideas.