This chapter discusses the tenth component of the Lean Canvas for Invention and explores in detail the answer of a question, the checklist, and templates. This chapter guides the researchers, academic inventors, and product developers how to look for and gather the skills and capacities through team building in order to implement the research methodology.
TopTeam Capacities
The tenth component of the LCI is the Team Capacities. As previous three components are offering answers to the HOW question of the LCI, this component continues to answer the same. Once key deliverables are clearly depicted, required key resources have been explored, desired funding has been proposed, and therefore, focus is now towards identifying individuals’ capacities within a research team and assigning research tasks accordingly. It is significant to understand that though teams are established to accomplish certain tasks and goals, but it is merely impossible without creating trust, harmony and positive bonding between the team members (Holton, 2001). In addition, exploring the individuals’ capacities within team and connecting these to specific tasks related to the key deliverables also needs a systematic approach. This chapter therefore emphasis on how the academic inventors and entrepreneurs may explore the capacities of research teams and can assign them distinct tasks to achieve the key deliverables effectively.
It is observed that different types of inventions need different types of capacities and therefore different team members are chosen for different key deliverables. Though team members may vary in their capacities according to the need of inventions for solving the real-world problem, however, the methods for constituting research teams and assigning them certain responsibilities may remain similar.
The research team usually encompasses a Principal Investigator (PI), Co-Investigators (Co-Is), and multiple undergraduate and postgraduate students depending upon quantum of research work and invention. Alongside collaboration may also be made with other university and industry experts to enhance the team capacities (Dewar & Isaac, 1998). However, it is important to understand that each of the team members may possesses their own motivation towards invention.
The PI of the research team is mainly responsible for the execution of the entire research process including planning, developing, conducting, managing, monitoring and documenting reports etc. However, a continuous support from one or multiple Co-Is and the team members in order to assist the PI in accomplishing the entire research process is also evident for research projects. Though Co-Is are not directly responsible for the invention and its commercialization but having their skills and capacities, in a form of in-depth investigations using multiple tools and techniques, certainly strengthen the accomplishment of the research process. For accomplishing the research objectives, selection of team members (undergraduate and postgraduate students) also depends on their skills and capacities (Hsu et al., 2016).
The PI has to explore these skills in Co-Is and in other team members and accordingly assign tasks for accomplishing the key deliverables. Each one of the team members possesses their own incentives and motivation (Clark, 2003) to work in a research project and resultantly offer high quality results. Suppose, PI may have a motivation of developing a company based on invention, Co-Is may have their motivation of enriching their experience and learning and students may be motivated of accomplishing their degrees. Whatever is the reason of joining a research team a collective learning is always an outcome (Fenwick, 2008).
In order to identify the skills and capacities of the team members towards journey of inventing solutions of the real-world problem, the following two questions are proposed by this component of the LCI to be answered by the academic inventors and entrepreneurs and Principal investigators:
These two questions direct the academic inventors and entrepreneurs and Principal Investigators to look for team members having required skills and capacities with respect to distinct key deliverables. In order to create a balanced team, Meredith Belbin has proposed nine roles in a team and classified these roles in three major groups namely: thinking oriented, action oriented and people oriented (Belbin, 2012).