Nearly every business leader I meet fears being overcome by tech-savvy upstarts. That fear drives their companies to invest millions into coming up with breakthrough innovations. But a sickening number of those investments fail. Truth is, you can have the right portfolio of investments, the right metrics and governance, the right stage-gate development process, and the right talent on the right teams — but if you don’t design the right handoffs between your teams, all of that planning falls apart.
How to Hand Off an Innovation Project from One Team to Another
If innovation projects are going to succeed, they’ll need to survive a handoff from an innovation team to an execution team. How do you prevent the baton from being dropped? By tailoring each handoff to the teams involved. There are five basic models. The Owner’s Manual is the most commonly used, and also probably the least effective. After months of work, an innovation team extensively documents their work and then hands all of that over to an execution team, which usually never reads the documentation. Other, more successful models include the Architect approach, where someone from the innovation team stays with the project to oversee its success, and the Ambassadors method, where multiple people from the innovation team stay on. Finally, there’s the Hive, in which multidisciplinary teams tackle challenges across the initiative’s life cycle, essentially eliminating the handoff entirely.