Why the most important decision an innovation director makes isn’t what project to fund, but who they choose to build it.
As an innovation director, your portfolio is likely full of “brilliant ideas.” You have slide decks packed with hockey-stick projections, disruptive concepts, and promises of market dominance.
Yet, the uncomfortable truth of our industry is that most of these projects will die on the vine. They won’t fail because the initial idea was bad. They will fail because the team couldn’t navigate the messy, nonlinear reality of bringing something new to life inside a complex organization.
In the high-stakes world of corporate innovation, we spend too much time validating the project and not enough time validating the team.
If you want to de-risk your innovation portfolio, you need to adopt a fundamental truth from the venture capital world:
A good team can pivot a bad idea into a success, but bad team will likely crush an good idea.
Why “team first” beats “idea first”
Innovation is rarely a straight line from concept to launch.1 It is a series of hypotheses requiring constant testing, failing, learning, and pivoting.
When you bet on a rigid “great idea,” the moment market assumptions shift or technical hurdles arise, the project stalls. The team, married to the original concept, becomes paralyzed.
When you bet on the right team composition, you are betting on resilience. You are assembling a unit capable of realizing that the initial idea is flawed, and having the diverse skills necessary to find the better idea hidden adjacent to it.
So, who do you pick? You need a “minimum viable team” that balances the three critical lenses of innovation: Feasibility, Desirability, and Viability.
1. The hacker (the architect of feasibility)
The voice of “Can we actually build this?”
In a corporate setting, the hacker isn’t just someone who writes code quickly. They are the master of technical feasibility. They understand your organization’s legacy infrastructure, security protocols, and data governance—and crucially, how to build speed-boats alongside those battleships.
They don’t just create the prototype; they ensure the prototype won’t collapse when you try to scale it.
- Without them: You get “vaporware”—beautiful concepts that are technically impossible to implement within budget or regulatory constraints.
- Example: Your team wants to use generative AI for customer service. The hacker is the one who figures out how to sanitize your proprietary data to train the model without leaking IP, rather than just using an off-the-shelf API that violates company policy.
2. The hipster (the guardian of desirability)
The voice of “Will anyone actually use this?”
Do not mistake the hipster for someone who just “makes things look pretty.” They are the user’s advocate. They possess deep empathy and are obsessed with the customer journey. They translate dry business requirements into intuitive, human experiences. They are the antidote to feature bloat.
If the hacker ensures the product works under the hood, the hipster ensures the driver enjoys the ride.
- Without them: You build a robust, compliant, functional monstrosity that requires a 200-page manual to operate. Users revolt, and adoption metrics flatline.
- Example: Your company wants to launch a complex new B2B financial tool. The hipster realizes through user interviews that the target audience is terrified of making mistakes. They redesign the interface to focus on “guardrails” and reassurance mechanisms, rather than just adding more data dashboards.
3. The hustler (the catalyst of viability)
The voice of “Should we build this, and how does it sustain itself?”
The hustler is not a salesperson; they are a business strategist. In corporate innovation, their job is doubly hard: they must validate the external market and navigate internal politics.
They are responsible for the business model, securing stakeholder buy-in, defining KPIs, and ensuring the project aligns with the overarching corporate strategy. They package the work of the hacker and hipster so it can survive an executive steering committee review.
- Without them: You have an expensive R&D hobby. The team builds cool features that solve no meaningful business problem and have no path to ROI.
- Example: The team has a great prototype. The hustler is the one realizing that the current pricing model cannibalizes an existing core product line. They pivot the strategy to position the innovation as an upsell module, turning internal enemies into allies.
The director’s role: orchestrating tension
When assembling your next innovation team, do not look for three people who get along perfectly. If your hacker, hipster, and hustler agree on everything in the first meeting, you have a problem. You are looking for constructive tension at the intersection of their domains.
- The hustler wants to launch next week to beat a competitor.
- The hacker wants to delay a month to refactor the security architecture.
- The hipster wants to delay two weeks because user testing showed confusion in the onboarding flow the color of the logo is not the perfect green.
Your job as director isn’t to eliminate this friction; it is to manage it. That friction is where the de-risking happens. It’s the crucible that burns away bad assumptions before you scale them.
The takeaway: The next time a shiny new project proposal crosses your desk, flip to the last slide first. Look at the team. If you don’t see the a good balance send it back. Don’t fund the idea until you trust the architects.