Masterclass Series: Design and build your innovation team

This interactive webinar series (3 x 90 minutes) is for leaders and changemakers who are building—or rebuilding—innovation teams. Whether you're starting from scratch or rethinking your current approach, you’ll leave with practical tools, sharper strategy, and renewed clarity on how to make innovation stick in your organisation.

Part 1: Wednesday 18 September

Diagnose Before You Design - Understanding Your Innovation
Context

Goal: Help participants gain clarity on their current environment, past efforts, and readiness to build a successful innovation team.

Key Themes:

• The “Why” behind the team: What’s the problem you’re trying to solve or the opportunity you want to seize?
• Organisational drivers and desired outcomes.
• Looking backwards to move forward: What did past teams do? Why did they succeed or fail? What's changed?
• Readiness self-assessment: Team design constraints (e.g., budget, talent access, political capital).

Part 2: Wednesday 25 September
Choose Your Innovation Team Model – Architects, Builders, or Enablers

Goal: Enable participants to define the right kind of innovation team for their context and resources.

Key Themes:

• Three primary roles: Designing innovation (Architect) vs Doing innovation (Builders) vs Enabling innovation (Enablers) – What’s the right fit?
• What different models look like: Centralised teams, distributed networks, venture studios, skunkworks, etc.
• Trade-offs: Speed vs scale, experimentation vs integration.
• Designing the team: Skills mix, mindset, structure.

Part 3: Wednesday 2 October
Activate and Sustain – Building Buy-in, Delivering Value, and Staying Accountable

Goal: Help participants think about what it takes to make the team effective over time and build credibility.

Key Themes:

• Stakeholder strategy: Mapping allies, resistors, and champions. How to win early advocates and build momentum.
• Proving value early: Setting learning goals and outcome-based metrics.
• Governance and evolution: How to review, course-correct, and avoid “innovation theatre.”
• Keeping the team energized: L&D, internal storytelling, recognition.

Who should attend?

Anyone wanting to understand more about the mechanics of innovation, team building and getting from now to next will benefit from attending this masterclass series. Even if you are not looking to build your innovation capabilities immediately the tools and insights Susie will share will definitely enhance your thinking and knowledge of what it takes to design a more innovative organisation.

About our Speaker

Susie Braam is a highly accomplished leader and expert in corporate transformation and innovation. Her expertise lies at the intersection of innovation, strategy, and leadership, enabling organisations to thrive in today's rapidly evolving landscape.

With a distinguished 20+ year career in national security, Susie has held pivotal roles as head of innovation in Central Government, including setting up and leading multi-organisation incubators tasked with tackling some of the UK’s most persistent counter-terrorism challenges.

She also built organisation-wide innovation capability, developed innovation strategies and portfolios, set up and coached investment boards and professionalised innovation as a skill.

Since 2020, Susie has worked as a trusted advisor, trainer and coach. She has worked with executive teams engaged in large-scale digital transformation projects and with established organisations that have an ambition to grow beyond their core business.