The Innovation SWAT Team

Clorox's new CEO Donald Knauss takes over in September, and he says he plans to focus on innovation. Here's a suggestion for him: Instead of relying on a top-down approach to innovation strategy, which he implied is his intent, use approaches like the Innovation SWAT Team, or i-Team, to capture great ideas and bring the spirit of innovation throughout the organization at the same time.

This team, the practice of which was pioneered some years ago by Brigitte Jordan and her colleagues at IBM, is a group of roving innovation specialists who move throughout the company partly according to a plan, and partly directed by their own ears to the ground, looking for ideas to evoke and enrich, and for creative people to engage with. Their mission is to link top-level strategy, problem areas in the company, and innovation methods and tools with people at all levels, so that they become lively, engaged, and enthusiastic co-inventors of the future.

iTeams find venues of activity anywhere and everywhere by engaging people in thinking and talking about what’s happening inside and outside the organization, about what they do, how they do it, how the results of their work create experiences for customers, and how innovation in all its many guises can lead to improvements.

The iTeam uses all forms of interaction to bring forth latent ideas and interests, to help people at all levels of an organization to give shape to their ideas in a useful framework so that they can contribute to the ongoing improvements that changing markets demand.

For more on the i-Team see Chapter 5 of Permanent Innovation.