Good ideas can come from anywhere. And the best way to find the next big idea is to foster a diversity of ideas from a good team.
Good teams quickly recognize and kill off bad ideas and eventually find good ideas.
Bad teams can’t tell a good idea from a bad idea and they either stick with bad ideas for too long or hopelessly fumble good ideas.
The early stage is won with good teams versus good ideas.
Most new projects typically start with a founding team of 2-3 people and often grow to a core team of 5-7 people. Once you grow past these number, some additional splitting into smaller teams is often required.
If you have to rely on shared external resources to get work done, your speed of learning will be affected.
In order to maximize for speed, learning, and focus, you need to assemble a complete core team that is multi-disciplinary.
A complete team needs a good overlapping mix of Hacker, Hustler, and Designer skillsets.
On the one hand, your core team needs to be empowered to do whatever is needed to achieve the goal.
But the other extreme — granting a team full autonomy, where they answer to no one — is dangerous.
The right balance is semi-autonomy i.e. establishing an external accountability system that provides the team with autonomy to explore solutions while staying grounded to certain core business model constraints and goals.
Involvement of your internal and external stakeholders while practicing the Continuous Innovation Framework is key.
In addition to stakeholders, most teams new to the Continuous Innovation Framework will benefit from an external coach that is neither part of the core team nor a key stakeholder.