Innovation Perspectives - Assessing and Building Innovation Strengths

This is the fourth of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on 'How should firms develop the organizational structure, culture, and incentives (e.g., for teams) to encourage successful innovation?'. Here is the next perspective in the series:

by Dan Keldsen

In the absence of explicit top-level innovation support, how can you go from an "innovating army of one" (always useful, but frequently not sufficient), to building out innovation teams? And not just collections of people who want to innovate, but who are the best people for any particular challenge/problem that you are looking to overcome?


Heading: Right or Left? We Need Whole Brains on the Job

The old myth of "right-brain" vs "left-brain" continues to hurt us all in the business world. There has been an immense amount of research into the psychology, skills and strengths of innovators and creative problem solvers in the last 20 years, which is only beginning to get the attention it deserves.

Creativity in a business setting is not simply about having great product designers, marketers, and other so-called "creative people." If you do not also have creative technologists, salespeople, business development, managers, executives, etc., then you will never be able to create the full potential future of your organization, as there simply won't be enough energy, time, money and resources dedicated to the effort, unless you are incredibly lucky. Unfortunately, luck isn't a terribly reliable strategy.

While whatever made you successful in the past may have put you in a good position, perhaps even #1 in your industry, when sudden and massive changes strike, such as new competition, the rise of cloud computing and SaaS when your model is dependent on legacy and on-premise deployment, or economic upheaval - staying in a "left-brain" or operational and "stay the course" rut will (more than likely) result in a crippling of your business.

You may be able to recover, but then again, if innovation only happens in an emergency, will you have let the innovation muscles and skills of your people have atrophied to the point where you can't ramp up quickly enough to react?


Innovator, Know Thyself

Fortunately, there are many ways to head off this problem, and to jump-start innovation skills at the individual level, and then to expand up from there.

Just as you would assess the requirements for a new IT system to support the business, you can assess the individual skills and strengths of your own people to understand how to best take advantage of your personnel.

There are many assessment techniques in use, although many focus on specific business or technical skills. While those skills can be and frequently *are* important, my focus is on the core and broadly applicable creative problem solving and decision making skills and strengths that we all have.

Just as the problem isn't as black and white as left-brain vs. right-brain, it is not just that you are either an innovator or you are not.


We use an assessment called VIEW, which has now been used with over 20,000 people, to assess innovation across three continuums:

1. Orientation to change - Your responses to or ways of dealing with novelty, structure, and authority (Explorer to Developer)


2. Manner of processing - How you manage your energy and the energy of others during problem solving (External to Internal)


3. Ways of deciding - When making decisions, do you turn first to considering people needs, relationships, and harmony, or on the specific task and the quality of the outcomes and results? (People to Task)

By assessing the individual skills and strengths of yourself and at least your immediate and "normal" team members, you can specifically create teams that have the strengths and skills that you NEED to solve a given problem, rather than whomever happens to be around, has tenure, the "expected" technical skills, etc..

Using such an assessment can quickly point out that the teams you've created in the past, while likely to have been made of smart people, had the opposite innovation skills and strengths for the problems you've tried to solve.

Asking an extreme "in the box" thinker to come up with the next new, radical idea, while it can happen, is unlikely.

Target team creation by stacking the deck with the best of the best for that problem and you increase successful outcomes dramatically, and scientifically, repeatably.

I'm not suggesting that having technical skills to execute on ideas is not necessary, but having the skills to build/develop comes after you have first uncovered what you should be building, and those skills do not always exist in the same person.

Have you experienced working in teams that are clearly mis-matched for the problem at hand? Or perfectly aligned? Let's surface the war stories, as this is an area that needs far more attention than it typically receives.



You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles from the different contributing authors on 'How should firms develop the organizational structure, culture, and incentives (e.g., for teams) to encourage successful innovation?' by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Dan Keldsen is Co-founder and Principal at Information Architected in Boston, MA, providing analysis, consulting and training services to organizations worldwide on the application of technology to knowledge workers and managers.