Five traits of successful innovators

What makes an idea innovative? And what makes an innovative idea worthwhile? There is still no agreement on these issues.

For example, in disputes about which invention is more important - the Internet or the wheel, personal preferences are more likely to manifest than logical reasoning. Experts disagree on the type and level of innovation that brings the most benefit to organizations.
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Some studies argue that radical innovations (which sounds very attractive) provide stable competitive advantages, while others demonstrate that “moderate” innovations — that is, iPhone 5 rather than the original iPhone — are usually more effective and not last but not least, because they reduce market uncertainty. There are also unconvincing conclusions about the need to reckon with the opinion of consumers, while some studies show that consumer attention is detrimental to innovation, since it is tantamount to playing catch-up, but there are also dissent from this point of view. Even Henry Ford’s famous adage on this topic is challenged : “If I asked the people what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse.”

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And, as you know, we are very bad at evaluating our own ideas. Most people fall into the trap of the illusion of their own superiority, which is why they overestimate their creative talent - as it happens in any other field (for example, 90% of drivers believe that their level of skills is above average, which is mathematically impossible). This allows us to make sure that we cannot rely on how a person evaluates himself to determine the level of creativity of his ideas.

But still there are relatively well-defined criteria for predicting who can generate creative ideas . After all, research reveals a disproportionately high probability of the emergence of fresh and useful ideas for some people, for whom, regardless of their area of ​​competence, position, and work experience, the same psychological characteristics and behavioral options are characteristic. As a detailed review of more than 100 scientific papers summarizes, creative people usually do better at defining problems than solving them, they are passionate, sensitive and, above all, experience mental hunger: they are open to new experiences, have an inquiring mind and innovative thinking. These personal characteristics determine creative potential much better than IQ, school performance or motivation indicators.

However, creativity alone is not enough: innovation often requires the development, implementation and implementation of an idea. That is why the “latent” innovators are much more than the actual ones, and why we all have ever come up with great ideas, the implementation of which never came to fruition. Here are a couple of mine: “friend hire” - a service that allows tourists to hire locals who can give them useful tips or just make a company, as well as an application for searching dates by location, which looks for a nearby personal profile to you. These ideas, like most of my ideas, were successfully implemented by other people whose heads they also visited.

The key difference between creativity and innovation is in the performance : the ability to turn an idea into a successful service, product or enterprise. If, as William James noted, “truth is what happens to an idea,” entrepreneurship is the process of transforming creative ideas into useful innovations. Considering that entrepreneurship involves the human factor - it depends on the decisions and behavior of specific people, a logical approach to understanding the essence of innovation is to study the basic characteristics of enterprising people, that is, people who are the driving force of innovation, regardless of whether they founded own business or work for hire. This study reveals several key characteristics (in addition to creativity):

1. Flexible thinking that helps them identify unoccupied market niches. Opportunities are the foundation of entrepreneurship and innovation, and some people notice them much better than others. In addition, these people are genetically programmed to innovate : they crave a new and complex experience, looking for diversity in all aspects of life. This is consistent with higher rates of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder among business founders.
2. Formal education or training that is needed to notice new opportunities, recognize them in the current context. Contrary to popular belief, the most successful innovators are not geniuses of the highest standard, but well-trained professionals. Without special knowledge it is difficult to distinguish meaningful information from unimportant, noise from a signal. This is evidenced by the results of studies confirming that entrepreneurial training pays off.
3. Proactivity and great persistence that allows them to develop the discovered opportunities. First of all , effective innovators differ from colleagues by more purposefulness, stability and energy.
4. Healthy care . This would surprise many, but successful innovators are usually more organized, prudent and not risk-averse than most people (increased risk is inevitable when starting a business, but it is not related to its success).
5. Social capital on which they rely throughout the business process. Serial innovators seek to use available communications and networks to mobilize resources and build strong alliances, both internal and external. The popular notion of entrepreneurship glorifies innovators as independent geniuses-individualists, but innovation is always a team product. In addition, enterprising people usually have a higher emotional intelligence ratio ( EQ ), which allows them to sell their ideas and strategies, as well as to communicate the main mission to other team members.

Even if people have all five of these characteristics, you should not expect true innovation from them in the absence of a meaningful mission or long-term vision. In fact, vision is the point where entrepreneurship and leadership meet: no matter how creative, flexible or proactive you are, a critical feature of a successful innovator is the ability to push forward to innovate other people. Without it, you will not attract the right talents, do not build and inspire the team and do not retain the status of innovator, even having achieved success. As Francis Bowen and his colleagues recently noted , “there is a vicious circle in which innovation leads to better indicators in the future, but this investment can also cause an increase in rigidity, which will reduce the innovation potential.” In other words: innovation leads to growth, but growth hinders innovation ... except when innovation becomes an integral part of organizational culture, for which effective vision is needed.

In short, it makes no sense to just hope for a breakthrough idea; the real value is the ability to generate many ideas, to find the right opportunities to develop them, to act with enthusiasm and dedication to achieve a meaningful goal.

Ideas do not make people successful - everything is exactly the opposite.


About the translator

The article is translated in Alconost.

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