Innovation, Part II: What Makes an Innovative Individual?

On Wednesday, I told you about a paper in Vol. 18 of Technology and Innovation, written by Victor Poirier and a whole slew of his colleagues, specifically the process of innovation that they outlined. However, the deeper you get into the process, the more you realize that all individuals are not equally equipped to proceed along that path.

So, what skills do you need to be innovative? And how can you develop those skills?

When we consider of our favorite geniuses and creative minds (e.g. Albert Einstein or Sigmund Freud), we’ll find that they have certain things in common; namely that they come from locales separate from their respective “centers of excellence,” they gain dominance in their domains in an average of ten years, and then they move to their center of excellence in order to interact with the other great minds in their fields.

Unsurprisingly, those factors aren’t very easy to replicate in ourselves, regardless of how ambitious we are. Luckily, Poirier and his colleagues provided us with a much less circumstantial list of characteristics of innovators:

1. They are abstract thinkers and superb problem solvers.
2. They have depth of knowledge in one subject, and a breadth of knowledge across others.
3. They want to fill the gaps in their knowledge base.
4. They have strong intrinsic motivation and they find inner satisfaction in working for the greater good.
5. They are creative and imaginative.
6. They have an innate and insatiable curiosity.
7. They take risks because they aren’t afraid of failure; they’re challenged by it.
8. They have a positive outlook that allows them to be receptive to new possibilities.
9. They combine persistence and passion into a desire for excellence.
10. They have a dissatisfaction with settling for the way things already are.
11. They are open-minded and are capable of considering limitless possibilities.
12. They appreciate cross-fertilization, and understand the benefits of an outside discipline’s perspective on their ideas.
13. They communicate their ideas and concepts in a clear and precise fashion.
14. They have an excellent sense of timing, understanding when to present a given idea.

This laundry-list of interlocking skills is rather daunting to consider, but it’s qualified by the fact that “innovators can also have any combination of these traits, but some of the traits and characteristics may be thought of as being more conducive to innovation than others.”

As I read about each of these traits, I couldn’t help but evaluate my own skills on those terms—an interesting exercise to say the least.

To cultivate these innovative traits, the authors speak first of working against the idea that inspiration is solely a spontaneous occurrence, instead shifting the focus to the idea that inspiration can be worked toward and innovative skills can be grown. In addition, the authors suggest a high level of individual involvement and independence, as well as “the ability to confront failure and grapple with ill-defined problems.”

Gaining skills comes much more easily to most people than changing our thinking. Learning to accept contrary ideas—for example that failures are not necessarily failures—is not an easy task. Then again, neither is innovation.

Image credit: Bashaier Said