For the last five years or so, many CEOs have named ‘innovation’ as a top-of-mind priority for their companies. Numerous studies by industry and technology management and innovation consultants have established a positive link between a company's ability to innovate and shareholder return. Within the last three years, however, it has become clear that while many senior managers acknowledge the imperative to innovate, many organizations struggle to actually raise their game. Many are asking, “Can innovation be taught?”

There are several reasons why it's difficult to become more innovative. Risk-aversion and the behaviors it fosters are particularly big killers. If employees are measured and focused on success, they may quickly dismiss breakthrough propositions as a reaction to what looks like unsound, immature, and sure-fire-ways of not delivering the year's numbers. Breakthroughs require tools and techniques which explore and focus on the opportunity being considered. Breakthroughs require the expert input of managers and professionals probably not from the operational or departmental area tasked to deliver. And they require a conviction that the new approach and innovation will lead to moving the business forward. The requirement to possess conviction presents a real challenge. If you haven't done it before how can you ‘believe’ you can do it now?

The answer? Work with someone who has done it before. Work with serial innovators. Share tools and techniques which stimulate and direct creativity and prepare teams for the challenge of execution. Pass along a mindset for navigating the unknown. So to answer the question in the headline, yes, innovation can be taught. And here's how.

Form the right team

Innovation teams, hopefully comprised of a group of professionals from across an organization, must possess several critical attributes to navigate potential pit falls of an innovation challenge. First of these is domain expertise. Real skill, not merely passion, is the raw material which develops meaningful new insights into needs of customers, exploits the right technology, and realizes business opportunity. A good rule of thumb: if members of a new team haven't worked together before because their skills sets are not regularly paired in the organization, it's a good start.

The second area to consider is thinking style. Create a team with both left and right-brain thinkers. For example, some people relish facts, detail, and planning (left-brainers) while others prefer to speculate on the future and feel their way through a task (right-brainers). Breakthrough work absolutely requires both modes of thinking, and unbalanced teams run the risk of faltering on either the creative or analytical demands of the challenge.

Third, innovation team members must be resilient. They may create a wonderful product, but their organization may reject it because it is so different from the norm.

Commandeer an innovation work space

The term ‘skunk works,’ popular in the early 1990's, was given to autonomous project teams tasked with blue-sky projects and often with a good deal of secrecy thrown in. While we don't advocate secrecy, getting a new group of people trained in unfamiliar tools, approaches, and attitudes, means taking them out of their day-job environment.

Placing the new team in its own space when it first meets greatly boosts their ability to learn, think, and work quickly. Getting ‘off site’ might mean hiring a hotel conference facility. A better solution commandeers a less-sterile space, such as an old barn or simply some dedicated area in your own facilities. What matters is the team can shut the door on daily distractions, get away from the hourly checking of email, and design the space to meet their needs.

Use the right innovation tools

These fall into several categories:

• Tools to develop understanding. For instance, before generating concepts, a team must become wise to the nature of the situation. If a consumer group is at the heart of an issue, a team must gather data about the consumer's needs and understand how they think. For market-share challenges, data on the competition's activities is a must-have. And developing a new device calls for exploring technology.

• Tools to release creativity. It has become something of a cliché to ask employees to cover a wall with sticky notes with their ideas. Much more can be achieved if idea and concept generation is properly framed and purposefully stimulated. Devices such as flash cards depicting analogies to your challenge from other industries can create links to the challenge and promote new thinking and ideas.

• Tools to focus on and deliver results. Assessing and evolving the best concepts is a frequent stumbling point in the innovation process. Maturing ideas into investment-worthy propositions requires tools which morph the initial elements of an idea or solution into a rounded concept — even going so far as a first-pass business model and plan.

Be ready to execute

A good way to think of a newly formed innovation team and effort is as a black box into which you pour difficult, often messy challenges and out of which jumps inspiring ideas. If, however, the black box is not fully integrated into the business and supported by senior management, it is unlikely that resources will be marshalled appropriately to execute the project.

Management must be ready to execute any new proposition. Resources must be allocated to develop the new product. If the organization does not plan for this requirement, execution stalls badly while the CEO and business group managers stare one another down. Different companies tackle the hesitation different ways, but one way to overcome the hurdle is for senior management to realize it is their responsibility. As a first step, establish a separate board-level steering team with the duty to direct the energy of the innovating team and remove obstacles from its progress.

Despite these challenges, innovation remains a key to profitable growth and a hallmark of the medical sector's leading companies. For those companies willing to develop a new way of attacking product development, innovation teams may be part of the solution. These new teams have a precedent of success when implemented well, and are testament to the fact that innovation can be taught.