A dream team is a force to be reckoned with; it’s coordinated, aligned and productive. If your number one priority is to create, retain and galvanize a dream team, here are the essentials you need to know.
The typical phases of creating a dream team are forming, storming, norming and performing as described by psychologist Bruce Tuckman. But from my consulting experience in many areas of strategy, I’ve added the essential phases that aren't covered in team development: sustaining, adapting and innovating. Let's start from the top. 

1. Forming Phase

In the team-forming phase, the team members learn about each other and about how to work most successfully together.

• Define goals and objectives. Agree on what are you trying to achieve as a team.
• Learn each individual's personal objectives and what he/she wants to get from participating.
• Share baggage, i.e., discuss habits, personal preferences and attitudes or sensitivities. Make room for a discussion of personal circumstances that can impact the team's plans (such as pregnancy due dates, civic duties, etc.). Allow room to fit these into the schedule.

Leaders plan. Give instructions and engage their team to get input. Team members are familiarizing themselves with each other.

2. Storming Phase

Unforeseen issues begin to surface as team members work together. Interpersonal challenges must be recognized as opportunities for improving communications and processes.

• Disruptive factors, like unexpected personality traits, can become apparent.
• Conflicts may occur. Many conflicts are not intentional. Remember, every person joined the team because he/she shared the vision of all of the other team members. Everyone wants to accomplish their very best for the team and wants the team to succeed.
• Miscommunications may result in conflicts when people don't understand their roles well enough, and consequently, do not do what others thought that they were supposed to do.
• Look at and welcome differences between individuals' thinking.
• Give and receive constructive feedback.

During this phase, team members are discovering their differences. Communications are being improved. Conflicts are being resolved. And, leadership is providing guidance, much of which involves reselling team members on the team's original objectives.

Note that team performance can be predicted to dip during this adjustment phase.

3. Norming Phase

In this phase, team members come to notice the need for some ground rules for working together. For example, "We're not going to start meetings before 5:00 a.m. or after 10:00 p.m."

• Establish ground rules to help team members avoid placing unreasonable expectations upon one another
• Identify points of agreement as well as differing opinions.
• Redefine roles and responsibilities to optimally fit individuals' skills.
• Double-team. Have two people work on certain tasks to cover contingencies. For example, "One person might brainstorm assumptions, while another does modeling."
• Teach the team to remain open when setbacks occur; identify solutions and resolutions to issues.

Team members are starting to participate more fully at this stage, as leaders establish common ground. 

4. Performing Phase

At this stage, the team is proficient and performing at peak levels. Team members can:

• Quickly and effectively implement tasks
• Celebrate successes
• Remain open when setbacks occur
• Seek resolutions to problems instead of blaming
• Continue to welcome constructive input

People now know what they need to do. And, they know their fellow team members' strengths and weaknesses, so they can complement each other's skills and compensate for limitations. Leadership is now characterized by delegating.

5. Sustaining, Adapting and Innovating Phase

This phase is often not included in the normal stages of forming a team, yet it is the most important phase if an organization wants to grow and succeed. Team members must adapt and have a spark of creativity to adjust as roles change. The blueprint for success is a solid culture and being aware of personal styles as well as constantly adapting and sharpening your team leadership.

The following are some factors involving team character that influence your culture and successful teamwork:

• The team members agree on what is required to reach the common goal.
• There is a teamwork culture of prioritizing working well together.
• An atmosphere of trust encourages the best performance by every member.
• Team members understand their specific roles and how those facilitate reaching the goal.
• People's lifestyles are well-balanced with their responsibilities for team tasks.
• Communications and expectations in regards to plans and milestones are clear.

Interpersonal Keys To Building A Winning Startup Team

To merge personalities into a cohesive team, acquire deeper insights into the four basic differences in ways individuals think and operate introduced below. Then, instead of treating people as you want to be treated, treat them as they want to be treated. Teach your team members to do the same.

• Relators are open and direct. They include others in decision making.
• Socializers are very open and direct and want to know that you're interested in them.
• Thinkers are more guarded and indirect; they hold high expectations of themselves and others.
• Directors tend to be guarded and direct. They need to achieve and are most comfortable when they're in charge.

The Framework For Your Leadership Model

Building the best team requires the kind of leader who encourages and nurtures team members' development. Prerequisites for leaders and mentors of such character include attributes of being interested in people, being a straight talker, and knowing when to pivot. Follow their examples:

• Interact frequently.
• Provide individual coaching to enhance your understanding of the team.
• Provide group coaching to allow each person to understand.
• Reward good work.
• Keep your eyes open to possibilities and continuously learn.

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Evaluate your leadership success by how well you inspire people to do whatever needs to be done to reach the goal and to passionately believe in the value of doing it. Good luck on building your dream team!

​In this blog post, Jonathan Lui*, Managing Director for the Center for Advancing Innovation, clears up some confusion and gives a sneak peek into CAI’s newest competition, the Freedom from Cancer Startup Challenge.

We’re the CAI, not the CIA. It’s ok. We get that a lot!
While seemingly dissimilar, there are several important items the CIA has in common with us. Let’s clarify.

Wikipedia.com’s definition of the CIA:
“The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the United States federal government, tasked with gathering, processing and analyzing national security information from around the world, primarily through the use of human intelligence (HUMINT).”

Wikipedia.com’s definition of the CAI:
“The Center for Advancing Innovation is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based in Bethesda, Maryland focused on accelerating technology transfer and commercialization.”

We do have few things in common with the CIA: the use of human intelligence to gather, process, and analyze information from around the world, in the CIA’s case to protect and prevent bad things from happening; and in the CAI’s case to proactively launch good things. CAI was created with a mission to identify breakthrough federally-funded inventions and maximize their commercial potential to create high-growth companies, amplify and galvanize entrepreneurial ecosystems, and produce knowledge-based jobs.

The United States has encountered a moment of truth, a point in time where the courage and skill of our people should be put to the test. There is a real chance that, despite our many advantages, we will lose our innovation lead through self-inflicted wounds. CAI’s analysis has shown that across the United States alone, more than 150,000 federally-funded inventions are available to be commercialized yet many are collecting dust due to seemingly insurmountable barriers. At the CAI, we diligently work to change the status of these promising inventions, bringing them to market in order to impact the world in areas where we need them most. In particular, the world needs new cancer treatments. The cost of cancer globally is nearly $1 trillion dollars; in the US, by 2020, cancer will cost $158 billion. Drugs alone cost on average $256,000 per patient, per year, and cost of care is estimated to increase by 30% by 2020.  Approximately 20% of $131 billion in the US federal R&D expenditures are spent yearly on cancer research to address this issue.

CAI under the Microscope
By pairing mature and de-risked inventions with aspiring and seasoned entrepreneurs, CAI overcomes barriers to commercialization and accelerates technologies to market. CAI has orchestrated four startup challenges to date: the Breast Cancer Startup Challenge, the Neuro Startup Challenge, and the Nanotechnology Startup Challenge in Cancer, each with the National Institutes of Health, as well as the SPACE RACE, carried out with NASA. Through these challenges, CAI has trained more than 2000 entrepreneurs and launched over 58 startups, including the award-winning OneTest Diagnostics, Angio360, Pro-Arc Diagnostics, and Oncolinx, winner of the world’s largest startup investment prize ($1M from the state of New York). CAI startups are impacting many areas, including breast cancer, brain disorders, rare diseases, nanoscience, digital health, renewable energy, security, and more. In our newly launched competition, CAI is our endeavoring our most ambitious goal to date: creating 100 new companies to free the world from cancer.

Freedom from Cancer: Making the Impossible, Possible
To drive commercialization of cancer inventions, CAI has teamed up with the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and MedImmune, AstraZeneca’s biologics arm, to launch the Freedom from Cancer Startup Challenge (FCSC). The FCSC seeks to improve the standard-of-care for cancer treatments, reduce the economic burden of cancer treatment costs, and alleviate the pain and heartache of loved ones with cancer by commercializing cancer therapeutics, diagnostics, and medical devices. Cancer is not simply one disease. Cancer is a group of diseases with numerous causes, which are largely mysterious at the molecular and cellular level. There is no silver bullet, and there is no magic pill to “cure” cancer. Liberating the world from cancer will require a multidisciplinary approach, wherein teams of scientists, engineers, business people, and attorneys with entrepreneurial spirit create solutions to the many pain points in the cancer space. One team is not enough. The 100 winning teams from the FCSC will be greater together than they would be alone. Together with top inventions and passionate founders, these teams have the potential to truly defeat cancer.

Calling all Innovators
The Freedom from Cancer Startup Challenge is offering a unique opportunity for universities, hospitals, and federal labs to include their most promising cancer treatments and portfolios in the competition. After analyzing technology entries from around the world, CAI and our world-class selection committee will choose 100 inventions to make available for licensing by FCSC winners. Interested organizations and inventors can submit their invention(s) on the CAI submissions webpage here: http://www.thecenterforadvancinginnovation.org/submit-inventions.html

CAI isn’t just looking for the best ideas. We are looking for the most talented people, whom have the “Entrepreneur DNA” to build sustainable and impactful companies. Participation in the FCSC and other CAI challenges is free and virtual. Answer the call, organize your team, and enroll today.
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*Contributing bloggers: 
Rosemarie Truman, Founder & CEO, CAI
Cody J. Locke, PhD, Managing Partner & Program Leader, CAI
Sourav Sinha, CEO of Oncolinx & Entrepreneur-in-Residence, CAI
Vanessa Ramirez, Marketing Coordinator, CAI

Immunotherapy can work in two different ways. It can enable a person’s own immune system to work smarter/harder to attack cancer cells. It can also give the immune system proteins which can help the system to identify cancer cells.

The importance of the year is 2016 and by 2020, we hope to have found a cure for cancer. This would be much easier said than done, except that there are no two cancers that are exactly the same. But much like when we as a nation shot for the moon the first time, this time Vice President Joe Biden has enlisted the help of governmental agencies, pharmaceutical companies, health care professionals, and more to band together in the largest collaborative effort to make this moonshot happen.

Moonshot for Immunotherapy

Cancer has been plaguing our world for centuries, and modern science has come leaps and bounds since the dark ages, but there is still much to be done. With immunotherapy, the immune system is encouraged to fight back against the substances that are cloaking their visibility from the body. Immunotherapy stems from the fact that one approach for one mutation won’t solve the problem. However, the solution for someone’s lung cancer may also help with someone’s breast cancer. It all depends on the genetic makeup of the person and what the mutation is. The good news is that we’ve already mapped the human genome and now can study mutations on an entirely different level. 

Novel Commercialization Engines

Looking forward to programs accelerating cancer research and commercialization, The Center for Advancing Innovation (CAI) has created a first of a kind challenge-accelerator program designed to identify breakthrough inventions and move them beyond the research space and into the market place. Partnering with the NIH, CAI leverages a portfolio of over 25,000 inventions to bolt on new startups around novel, viable technologies.  Having launched four award-winning programs to date, two of these programs were of cancer focus (Breast Cancer Startup Challenge and Nanotechnology Startup Challenge in Cancer). 

CAI's challenge model has shown success in building extraordinary startups to leverage federal technologies. The program has launched 43 life sciences companies, commercializing technologies such as cancer immunotherapies, early-stage cancer diagnostics, and monoclonal antibodies targeting rare disease indications like mesothelioma. If the program can continue to cultivate and commercialize even a fraction of the vast portfolio of 150,000 federally-funded inventions, there exists an unprecedented potential to impact cancer health in the US.

The QUILT Program

One manifestation of the increased collaboration between governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations, technology companies, insurance companies, physicians, pharmaceutical companies, academic agencies, and research foundations has been QUILT, the Quantitative Integrative Lifelong Trial. Each partner in this effort will do its part to help pave the way for multiple treatments to be available to ensure lifelong remission for cancer patients.

This organization was made to control and coordinate the elements of the immune system by testing new combinations of cancer vaccines, immunotherapy, chemotherapy, radiation, and immunomodulators. This means that those involved in QUILT will help cancer patients try any and all treatment options available to them. The goal of QUILT is to diagnose and sequence 100,000 people diagnosed with cancer which will allow them to assign 20,000 to immunotherapy care that targets 20 types of cancer.

Rare Cancers
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Fighting rare cancers, like mesothelioma, is difficult for many different reasons. Due to the nature of being rare cancers, there isn’t as much funding for research to be done for prevention and new types of treatment. However, since immunotherapy targets the immune system and the protein expressed, a wide range of cancers can be treated with one medicine.
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Keytruda has been used to treat different types of cancer, including melanoma, non-small cell lung cancer, mesothelioma, and head and neck squamous cell cancer. This is possible because Keytruda tests for cancer that is positive for the “PD-L1” protein. This is the case for about 40% of mesothelioma patients and according to a study done in 2015, 3 out of 4 mesothelioma patients participating in the Keytruda clinical trial showed improvement.

​http://www.mesothelioma.com/blog/authors/emily/