Architects, Builders, and Enablers: Choosing Your Innovation Team's Role
- Susie Braam
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
In Article 1, I explored why innovation teams fail. In Article 2, I introduced the six dimensions of organisational readiness you need to assess before launching an innovation function.
But there's another question we need to answer: What type of innovation team do we actually need to meet our needs?
It's a bit like our restaurant metaphor. Before you hire staff, you need to decide: are you opening a restaurant that creates new dining concepts and expands into new markets? One that perfects a specific cuisine and delivers it brilliantly? Or one that trains and supports franchisees to run their own kitchens?
These are fundamentally different businesses requiring different people, skills, and ways of working.
The same is true for innovation teams.
Three Fundamental Orientations
Through my work with organisations across sectors, I've identified three core orientations for innovation teams. Most successful teams have a primary orientation, even if they do some work in other areas.
Architects design innovation systems and strategy. They create the frameworks, governance structures, and processes that enable systematic innovation across the organisation. They answer questions like: Where should we focus our innovation efforts? How do we evaluate and prioritise opportunities? What's our innovation portfolio strategy?
Builders execute innovation projects and create new solutions. They take a specific problem or opportunity and develop something new - a product, service, process, or business model. They answer questions like: How do we solve this customer problem? What should we prototype and test? How do we get this to market?
Enablers support others to innovate within their roles. They build innovation capability, provide coaching, run training, and create the cultural conditions for innovation to happen throughout the organisation. They answer questions like: How do we help teams adopt new ways of working? How do we spread innovation skills? How do we create psychological safety for experimentation?
I've drawn inspiration from Simon Wardley's "Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners" framework, which maps different types of people to different stages of technology maturity. Where Wardley asks "who thrives at which stage?", this framework asks "what job is the team hired to do?" - design systems, deliver solutions, or develop capability in others.
Architects in Practice
A mid-sized media company had innovation happening in pockets - the digital team experimenting with AI, product development launching new offerings, and operations going rogue by finding workarounds for outdated solutions. There was no coordination. Teams competed for the same resources and couldn't articulate how their work connected to strategy.
They didn't need more people building things. They needed someone to design the system: a prioritisation framework, a stage-gate process, clear criteria for investment decisions, and governance that connected innovation to strategic planning cycles.
Their innovation team of two spent their next year as Architects. They saw an opportunity to work with newly created lines of business to develop innovation strategies focused on each LoB’s priorities. They helped them to develop a pipeline of projects and a stage-gate process, which helped them decide which project to allocate funding to and which to pause or kill off. This also created much needed transparency for those involved.
This approach enabled them to systematically take ideas related to strategic priorities into development and some through to scale. This unlocked far more value than a team of ten Builders working without direction.
Signals you might need Architects:
Innovation is happening but feels scattered and uncoordinated
You can't articulate your innovation priorities or how you make investment decisions
Good ideas die in ambiguity because there's no clear path forward
Leadership wants innovation but hasn't defined what that means strategically
Builders in Practice
A social housing association faced a specific challenge: it was becoming increasingly difficult to get access to tenant properties for maintenance visits - existing approaches weren't working. They had a clear problem, executive sponsorship, and ring-fenced budget. What they lacked was a team with the skills to deeply understand tenant behaviour, prototype new approaches, and rapidly test what worked.
They assembled a small Builder team - a service designer, a data analyst, and a housing specialist - with a focused mandate: increase the number of maintenance visits carried out within 2 weeks of the due date. Within six months, they'd tested twelve interventions and scaled three that showed measurable impact.
Signals you might need Builders:
You have a specific, well-defined problem or opportunity
You need new solutions, products, or services created
The challenge requires dedicated focus and specialist skills
You have the clarity and resources to support execution
Enablers in Practice
In my second Head of Innovation role (National Security sector), my first action was to carry out discovery work to understand the reality of the organisation’s innovation maturity. What I found was that whilst innovation was happening sporadically and in small pockets, maturity was low, particularly among the organisation’s leadership.
I made the decision to shift the innovation team’s focus from running projects to enabling others. I created a new Head of Entrepreneurial Discipline and hired someone into the role who I had seen shift innovation skills and culture in another organisation. Together, we provided training for innovation teams and leadership, created an internal coaching and peer learning network, and worked with HR to align recognition systems and job role requirements with innovation behaviours.
Within eighteen months, the number of employees who could evidence impact through innovation had quadrupled. And the leadership were increasingly an enabler, rather than a blocker.
Signals you might need Enablers:
Innovation capability is low across the organisation
Good initiatives fail to sustain because of cultural resistance
You need to shift mindsets and behaviours, not just create new things
The goal is widespread innovation, not centralised delivery
Choosing Your Orientation
The decision matrix below can help you identify which orientation fits your context. Plot where your organisation sits on two dimensions:
Vertical axis: Organisational Readiness
High readiness (strong foundations) → can support more ambitious approaches
Building readiness (foundations in progress) → start smaller
Horizontal axis: Primary Need
Change culture/systems → Architects or Enablers
Deliver projects/products → Builders
This gives you four quadrants:
High readiness + Systems focus → Architects
High readiness + Project focus → Builders
Building readiness + Systems focus → Enablers
Building readiness + Project focus → Start Small (pilot projects to build credibility)
Pressure-Test Your Choice
Before committing to an orientation, honestly answer these questions:
If you're leaning toward Architects:
Do you have the executive sponsorship needed to implement new systems and governance?
Will the organisation accept and adopt frameworks, or will they gather dust?
Is the real problem a lack of strategy, or a lack of execution?
If you're leaning toward Builders:
Is the problem or opportunity clearly enough defined to brief a team?
Do you have the operational readiness to absorb and scale what they create?
Are you building solutions to problems that actually matter to the business?
If you’re leaning towards Builders but your maturity is low:
Start small on one clearly defined problem which you’ve got licence to address and the skills to explore
This isn’t so much a fourth orientation as a starting point for organisations not yet ready for a dedicated team.
If you're leaning toward Enablers:
Is the organisation ready to invest in capability that takes time to show results?
Do you have leaders who will role-model the behaviours you're trying to spread?
Is the real barrier skills and mindset, or something more structural?
A Note on Hybrids
In practice, many innovation teams blend orientations - and that can work. For example, in that second Head of Innovation role, after an initial focus on Enabling through building innovation awareness and skills, we gained sufficient credibility and buy-in to start the Architectural challenge of designing innovation systems, pipelines and strategies.
But I've seen teams struggle when they try to do everything at once without clarity on their primary focus. If you're a team of one or two, pick a primary orientation. Build credibility there. Then expand.
If you're a larger team, you might have people in different roles - but be explicit about it. "Sarah leads our Builder work; James focuses on Enablement" is far healthier than everyone doing a bit of everything.
What To Do Next
Use the decision matrix to identify your starting orientation.
Pressure-test your choice with the honest questions above. Better still, ask a trusted colleague to challenge your thinking.
Get specific about what this orientation means for your team. What will you do - and critically, what will you not do?
In the next article, I'll introduce the Innovation Team Model Canvas - a practical tool for designing the specifics of your team once you've chosen your orientation.
This is Article 3 in a series on building innovation teams that actually work. Subscribe at www.susiebraam.com for early access to tools and future articles.
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