Huddle up. You, as the company coach, need to carefully draft a team to carry out day-to-day plays. But you can’t draft only linemen, nor can you just choose receivers.

In football, players depend on each other for success. Quarterbacks can’t succeed without linemen blocking for them, and linemen can’t block without the quarterback’s clear directions. Offensive and defensive captains must make split-second judgments, but they also need to hear feedback from team members.

Innovation, like football, is a team effort. Without designers, developers have no vision for a prototype, but without developers, designers’ creations never become reality. Each member must have input into decisions, but they function best with a single leader in charge.

But it’s not just what happens on the field that matters. Neither football nor innovation teams can succeed with broader support. They need financial advocates to win funding, HR support to fill open roles, and marketers to share their creations with the world.

Draft Your Company’s Playmakers

For enterprise companies, the stakes are high. No matter how successful the product, market saturation leads to diminished returns and slowed growth rates.

To re-take the field, you need a new crop of innovators. Each touchdown they make helps to bridge the gap between existing revenues and future growth.

Lowe’s Innovation Lab, for instance, is helping the home improvement chain prepare for a future of smart homes and businesses. With partner Made in Space, Lowe’s is creating some out-of-this world innovations, including a 3D printer that’s to be used aboard the International Space Station. Closer to home, the innovation team created OSHbot, an artificially intelligent robot to welcome visitors into its stores and help them search for products.

But innovation labs aren’t just for brick-and-mortar brands.You can credit Amazon’s Innovation Lab for the Echo, IBM’s innovation lab for early IoT solutions, andAutodesk for powerful, factory-grade 3D printers.

When you can’t afford to fumble, here are the five players you need to draft for your innovation team:

1. The Visionary
   At my company, we just call him Tony. Tony breaks open the box, envisioning that which is not yet visible. He’s one part dreamer, one part creator. When he sees problems that others haven’t addressed, he breaks out the whiteboard to find a solution. By definition, your innovation team needs to develop new ideas, so the visionary is a must.
   
   
2. The Designer
   New ideas are wonderful, but at the end of the day, you’re a business owner. You could have the most brilliant idea in the world, but if it doesn’t make sense to your users, then it won’t sell. The designer bridges that gap. Our designer, Kori, takes our ideas and designs experiences that resonates with users. One of her greatest strengths is feedback. When she thinks a concept can be improved, she doesn’t hesitate to say so.
3. The Architect
   The architect shares a lot in common with the designer. But beautiful mock-ups are worthless unless they work, so the architect’s role is to bring the designer’s concepts to life. Our architect, Rudy, has mastered many software languages, enabling him to turn Kori’s designs into real products with lightening speed. The architect takes an idea from the pages of the playbook to a win for the team.
4. The Persuader
   You have a cool product, so you’re done, right? Well, almost. You still have to sell it — both to the organization and to the market as a whole. That’s why you draft the persuader. If you have budget for it, you might even separate the role into internal and external persuaders. Not only could this person sell weed killer in the desert, but they also discern the good ideas from the bad. Our persuader, Tom, has a deep sales and marketing background that allows him to take a new product to market with great success.
5. The Mediator
   At the core of any creative team is a talented project manager. The mediator excels at balancing priorities and communicating effectively. With the gears greased and key players on the same page, your creative team is left to … well … create! Our mediator, America is a task management and communication fiend. She takes our vision and dices it up into small, actionable tasks. Without her, our team might have the play of a lifetime but score in the wrong in-zone.

Finding the right players to stock your team isn’t easy. When we interview for our innovation squad, we ask potential players to describe a problem they’d love to see solved and a potential solution.

The candidate’s answer will tell you whether or not — and, if so, where — the person fits on your team. Is he a dreamer, a creator, or a manager? Does he care more about the human or problem solving aspects of a project?

And, just like you’d check the stats of any potential draft, make sure you have team candidates take the Myers-Briggs and Gallup’s Strengths Finder to provide insights into their strengths and weaknesses.

At Yeti, innovation is at the heart of what we do. Sure, we build mobile apps and websites, but we’re really passionate about exploring fresh fields like virtual reality and the Internet of Things. So if you need innovators to score touchdowns for your brand, then drop us a line. We’d be happy to lift the Lombardi with you.

I wrote this piece as a freelance writer for Influence & Co.