The Innovation Team Scorecard

Score your team on the six steps, in the order they have to happen.

Innovation teams built on smart people and a creative space are usually gone within eighteen months. The people are rarely the problem. Usually, a step got skipped, or the steps were done in the wrong order.

This scorecard shows you which step is holding your team back. It comes from the playbook Phil McKinney used to build and run HP's Innovation Program Office, where the teams he led were named to Fast Company's Most Innovative list three years running, and then adapted over fourteen years running CableLabs.

Score your team from 1 to 5 on each step:

• Step 1: Build the culture before you hire anyone.
• Step 2: Recruit for specific roles, not just talent.
• Step 3: Adapt the process, don't adopt someone else's.
• Step 4: Fund it like innovation, not like operations.
• Step 5: Measure what keeps leadership bought in.
• Step 6: Lead it day to day.

Each step describes what a 1 and a 5 look like, gives you questions to ask yourself, and tells you where to start if your score is low. Then have a teammate score it separately. The gap between your two scores shows you where to start.