Innovators have a lot of characteristics. Here's one: Product innovators find the right balance between cooking something up in their lab with little input from the outside world and going out specifically asking people what they want or need. If he attempts to innovate in the lab alone, the result will probably not be that useful because it lacks real-world input. If he attempts to innovate by only responding to what people ask for, he will miss the opportunity to reach beyond the limits of evolutionary improvement and will be trapped by the creative capacity of those around him. The great innovator needs to know how to do both.

Links:

• http://www.ideo.com

posted February 1, 2008

I offer up that the best innovators have broad interests and diverse backgrounds with a capability to draw upon disparate sense-data, information and ideas to form a synthesis around the various inputs to create something with a focus toward the commercialization of the innovation within the existing and near-future boundary conditions of the business, economics and technical envelope.

posted February 1, 2008

Hi Jennifer,

A innovator usually has these inherent qualities and uncommon attributes:

1) He or she is innately a creative person and may express easily his/her unconformity about status quo, establishment, or system of credence, challenging it imaginatively like almost nobody might do, while foreseeing opportunities to the action and possible paths of evolution for the near future.

2) An innovator has the potential of being a transformational manager or leader; due to his/her ability to anticipate facts and trends that being developed through projects could change the business, political and/or technological landscape.

3) An innovator usually has the attribute of being an imaginative thinker, typically accustomed to develop “out of the box” thinking. He/she excels in developing lateral thinking while being able to propose innovative courses of action, moving forward in “roadmaps” where no one is at least enabled to be a worth competitor.

4) The capacity to inspire admiration in others, being a point of reference like a successful self-made man or woman is a trademark of who is considered a true innovator.

5) An innovator has the added value to foresee and help to make true a competitive advantage in corporate performance due to his/her ability of being instrumental to develop any innovative, if novel, corporate vision

6) A professional being innovator has the intrinsic quality of managing different grades of uncertainty to turn it on in successful opportunities of increasing corporate market share; being potentially able to introduce a wave of innovation in the corporate portfolio of products and services, and at last, and not less important, being instrumental to improve corporate financial performance.

7) An innovator has no room to succeed in enterprise environments where rules, corporate rigidity, and conservative corporate culture intervene as real inhibitors of creative thinking in action.

8) An innovator is a dreamer, an imaginative professional and sometimes, an idealist that would be happy breaking the rules and changing the world.

9) An innovator is an out-of-class creative and imaginative person that no admits any known benchmark to ascertain his/her intrinsic competences, attributes and qualities.

10) Many people usually has a stereotyped image of a true innovator as being someone eccentric like Albert Einstein, perhaps, a arrogant guy like Steve Jobs, a generalist genial like Leonardo Da Vinci, or perhaps a pragmatic and inventive one like Thomas Alba Edison.

My two cents …
Octavio

posted February 1, 2008

Creatrix has a simple overarching model and assessment. They see creativity as a function of: (1.) Creative Ability; (2.) Risk Taking Ability. I agree that these are key characteristics.

I see the competencies varying with each industry. Domain expertise is critical and so is top level sponsorship in a large company.

Knowledge of the innovation process can help. Some books that have helped me include: Innovation and Entrepreneurship; The Inventors' Handbook; The Creative Priority; Against All Odds; Edison (by Josephson); and Jump Start Your Business Brain. I also like the model by Doblin.

Good luck . . .

Dan Wallace

Links:

• http://www.creatrix.com/
• http://www.doblin.com/IdeasIndexFlashFS.htm

posted February 1, 2008

Interesting that so far the most commonly mentioned things are something along "creative", "ideas", "inspiring", "motivation", "out-of-the-box". It seems to me that all of these ideas are more attributes of inventors, and not innovators, and are merely good, but not great.

I would describe myself as a creative out-of-the-box thinker with lots of ideas, but I'm not an innovator. Here's why: "Innovators" for me have an "outside" proof that they can productize (or servicize, if that word exists) a concept that addresses a need of a market. You might have noticed that the word "new" is missing. I get to that later.

A) OUTSIDE: I've seen many VC presentations that were claiming be the holy grail for problem XYZ. For me an innovator is defined by an "outside" evaluation: Just because you are claiming to have found a new way of doing things doesn't mean that your prospect agrees with you. In that sense, you would only be "new", but not innovative.

B) PROOF: hard-facts such as ROI, TCO, revenue, profit, reduced churn, number of sales, etc., and more soft-facts - though measurable - such as satisfaction, experience, peace-of-mind, ...

C) PRODUCTIZE: something I can drop on your foot. Or, for that matter, something that helps you drop something on someone's foot ;). I've seen many ideas and inventions; not all of them were innovations. It also means that it doesn't need to be new, but that you were able to execute whatever it is you do that makes your "thing" tactile, sensible in the literal sense of the word. A tipping point might be the marketing approach, network of professionals, rolodex, enthusiasm, or timing, Latter one seems to be cited quite often by people who don't really know or don't want to take credit for why they actually succeeded with the most stupid idea or "old stuff". Sometimes the difference between an idiot and an innovator is success.

D) NEED: You have to address a need, not just a problem. A COO might know that he is not very efficient in communication, but the real perceived issue for the COO is that the product development teams are producing flawed products. If you are just pitching a new inhouse chat solution to them, your solution might be recognized as "new", or "helpful", or "interesting", but not as "innovative" within the COOs industry, because your solution addresses a problem below his I-Must-Take-Action-Threshold. If you spin your product to specifically address product development - maybe beyond quality control - the COO might have lots of "value" ready for you, with your "innovative" solution to help him achieve his goals and address one of his top needs right now - measurable.

E) ADDRESS: It's fine if *you* think you addressed the need, but how about your target client (the "listening" aspect)? As for A,B,C,D it's a *perception* thing: It doesn't matter if your "thing" is addressing the client's needs better, less, different, or at all, as long as it is perceived as such. Well, ok, if it is not addressing the client's needs at all, maybe you won't be that successful, but that's a matter of your KPIs - lots of people were churning out millions of dollars for a guy that didn't even remotely address their needs, but that brings me to the MARKET:

F) MARKET might be a market of one or a billion; an existing industry or a one-time thing; it's something that poses the opportunity to trade "values" with an expectation of a "win" from both sides. Guts, yes, but no need to be risky.

So maybe I'm an *innovator*, because I was able to commercialize some of my ideas and successfully sell my startup companies (which was rarely risky, btw). Now for the *great*: someone who can repeat that and maybe understands/feels what it takes to repeat things. Maybe process, maybe method, maybe tools, maybe something he/she cannot exactly point to. But they can repeat it, if they need to.

(and here I reached my limit of 4000 characters ;))

Links:

• http://www.playoutintelligence.com/2008/02/03/what-are-the-key-characterist...

posted February 3, 2008

I think the key quality of an innovator is a mindset that constantly looks at products and services and asks "what if?" As someone mentioned earlier, many of the attributes people have offered to answer this question really speak to inventors -- not innovators.

Inventors, at least to me, are folks who create new products, new product categories, new things that redefine a market or force people to think in a new way. By contrast, innovators are folks who take an existing product and make it better (kind of that slogan that BASF used -- "we don't make the product, we make it better").

I have often thought that Japanese companies are more innovative than inventive. The "relentless pursuit of perfection" really sums up Lexus as an innovative company. They didn't invent automobilies, but they have definitely made them safer, more stylish and more sophisticated through constant innovation (and surely, there have been a few inventions thrown in there as well). Another example would be the Wii. Nintendo didn't invent the gaming system marketplace (I think it might have been Steve Russell with Spacewar), but the Wii is a huge innovative leap forward.

Hope this helps.

posted February 4, 2008