Leadership and Teamwork in Innovation Ecosystems

As experts acknowledge innovation is rarely driven by individuals acting in an isolated capacity, it is generally a social and collaborative element that triggers the concepts of organizational behavior. The question is then how to create environments in projects and in organizations where individual's creativity and contribution fosters pollination to drive innovation. Studies confirm that the key impacting element in this area is teamwork quality, rather than team composition. Thus, organizations need to create teams with key traits that drive positive collaborations such as communication, coordination, balance of member contributions, mutual support, effort, and cohesion. These traits will allow a social group to deal with the inevitable creative tension needed for innovation ecosystems to flourish. Since human behavior is not mathematical, the only way to do this is creating the conditions for these traits to appear. In this context, leaders as social architects become very important, setting the tone of the organization, clearly defining the mission, identifying and living shared values, setting example, and understanding how organizations and social groups behave. When they are able to build high quality and performing environments, they become innovation brokers generating models that are scalable to be able to impact communities.