Innovation is a social activity. One person’s ideas build on another’s. Someone else reframes it through the eyes of the customer. It’s never clean or linear. To create an innovative team environment, the person leading the effort needs what entrepreneur Margaret Heffernan calls social capital. Social capital is the mortar that connects team members, the feeling of safety and trust that allows people to ask crazy questions and provide slightly less crazy answers without embarrassment, to iterate to greatness. But social capital has to be built, banked, and stored.
