subject: A Definition Of The Innovator/creator: Innovation Styles No. 1 [print this page] Every innovator is different, and each as a preference for a particular style of innovation. There are at least four of these preference styles, and most innovation people will normally be aligned to one, or at the most two of them. The key thing about this is that you need to have an instance of all four innovation preference styles if you want to minimize the chance an idea will fail.
The first innovation preference is the Innovator-Creator. We all know these kinds of people - they're the ones who come up with a constant stream of new ideas. Their great talent is inspiration from their surroundings, and using it to create new things which no-one else had thought of. Innovator-Creators, quite literally, see money growing on trees.
The Innovator-Creator is very exciting to be around, because they're almost always upbeat, positive, and always come up with that out-of-the-box thinking that challenges everyone around them. The work they do can be extremely distracting, because even when they are halfway through a problem, even if they've spent weeks getting to that point, they are just as likely to drop tools and find a "better way of doing things" than finish what they've started.
This leads to the major flaw of the Innovator-Creator: they are usually extremely poor at implementation.
They may be great at thinking new things up, but asking them to finish what they've started almost always ends up in tears. This is true, even if they are given sufficient resources to delegate all the operational aspects of what they set out to achieve. They are characterized by very short attention spans and extremely low boredom thresholds, so they'd much rather be dreaming up something new to do, than completing what is already in train.
Whilst the lack of operational implementation skills is the main disadvantage of the Innovator-Creator, they are also less than exceptional at seeing the downside in any of the ideas they've created. Because they find the process of creating new things so exciting, they tend to ignore any evidence that makes their "new big thing" look less positive.As a result, Innovator-Creators will often start things which are really, eye-poppingly stupid, only to have them explode in their faces later on.
The characteristic that defines the Innovator-Creator which is always consistent is a love of ideas new, no matter whether they have much relevance to a particular problem or not. If one wanted to find an innovator could be labeled a "cowboy", then this is it.
