Take Your Pick: A Guide on Building the Best Team for You

 
 

Decided to join the Conrad Challenge? Your first task is the Activation Stage, in which you’ll form your team. Sounds simple enough, but selecting the right teammates is a trickier challenge than you might imagine. First of all, make sure you and your team are eligible to compete. Your team should consist of 2-5 individuals, all aged between 13 and 18. You don’t want to find out that all of your teammates are too old for the Conrad Challenge far into process! But what else? 

You’ll want to find  teammates that mesh well together to lay a foundation for an effective and productive team. When we think about the strongest teams who have joined the Conrad Challenge, they all share two things: (1) compatible qualities and (2) complementary skills.

Compatible Qualities 🤞

Let’s start with compatible qualities. You’ll want to find individuals you get along with! As a team competing in the Conrad Challenge, you could be working together for 9 months or more, so make this experience an enjoyable one. Your team chemistry 🧪 is immensely important if you want to have good communication, respect, and trust. We see that Conrad teams with great team dynamics produce the most creative, innovative ideas, because those teams have the trust to bounce unique ideas off each other in addition to being able to work together. They are also the ones best equipped to make it to the end, because they can  split work manageably. 

Here’s a big one: you’ll need to find teammates who have a willingness to learn 📓 and the ability to adapt quickly. Chances are that this challenge introduces you to at least one term or concept you are new to. Never filmed and edited a video? Never wrote a go-to-market strategy? Never created a website? That’s okay! Look for team members who want to learn and have the hustle to make it happen! Experience is not always needed in Conrad; but a willingness to learn and work hard is! 

Finally, consider diversity, diversity, oh, and diversity. When Conrad teams are formed across students with different backgrounds, experiences, skills, and personalities, they bring in the broadest perspectives that make them better able to work through how their innovation can have an impact and how to bring it to the world.  That’s when real magic can happen!

Complementary Skills 🤝

You’ll also want to ensure your team possesses complementary skills that will be specifically relevant in the later stages’ submission materials. The following skill sets are worth looking into for getting a leg up:

  1. Persuasive communication 🗣️: Giving an elevator pitch? Communicating and addressing questions during the Q&A with the Conrad Challenge’s judges? Finding the right voice for the innovation video? All of these are vital deliverables of the Conrad Challenge, specifically the later stages. The Innovation Stage and the Power Pitch Stage require great communicators for a higher rate of success in selling your innovation and addressing questions and concerns. Make sure someone in your team has a talent for persuasive verbal and written communication.

  2. Ingenuity and idea making💡: Coming up with an idea that will succeed in the market requires witchcraft! 🧙‍♀️ Well… witchcraft or ingenuity. The Lean Canvas Stage requires you and your team to flesh out your innovation from identifying the problem statement to differentiating it from competitors. To be able to engineer a successful innovation from scratch requires coming up with vast amounts of ideas. In turn, ingenuity and creativity 🪄play a major role in finding solutions and product ideas.

  3. Web, video, and graphic design 💻: Having design skills is definitely a plus in the Challenge. You’ll find that great design skills are handy throughout, from preparing competitor battlecard slides to even creating a team logo and a website. When you get to the Innovation Stage, you’ll need to create a website, produce a short video, and mock up your innovation. Of course, plenty of teams learn these skills along the way, but it is certainly a nice boost if one of your teammates has some experience with design. 

  4. Data and analysis 📊: Proficiency in working with numbers is another plus! In the Innovation Stage, you’ll be crunching financials, calculating the total addressable market size, and sorting out the unit economics of your innovation 📈.