By Elise Kissling

Contrary to what we learned in school, innovation is not the brainchild of lone genius. It is the result of teamwork. Curating these teams is one of the most important jobs of anyone directing innovation efforts. This is especially true when your company needs to make a market for a new product or product platform. For companies that are upstream in the value chain, it is imperative to get people on board who understand the language of the people who will be making and implementing the customer product or solution.

Take our daylighting solution LUX, which aims to bring sunlight deep into buildings where there are no windows. The idea came from people in the lab working on various types of foils. However, chemists and optical physicists don’t necessarily know how design a system that an architect can integrate into a building at a price a building investor is willing to pay for.

That’s why we got an architect to take a leading role in developing the final product as well as the business model. The architect hit the ground running because he knows how the construction industry ticks. Even better, he did early market testing and helped the lab team to adapt the technology to feedback from the market. We were lucky to find an entrepreneurial architect in the company with an affinity for product design and market testing. However, this isn’t usually the case. That’s when an innovation-friendly HR policy can be a gamechanger, by that I mean one that allows innovation teams to quickly hire that talent they need to get the job done.