subject: Does Your Organization Have What It Takes To Innovate? [print this page] Does Your Organization Have What It Takes To Innovate?
Innovation has developed into the benchmark of success, particularly in the current business environment. Companies in each business are stepping up their efforts to turn out to be more innovative in the way in which they work, communicate and produce the products and services they sell. However with such an objective, the apparent challenge becomes, the way to determine the people within an organization who possess the best potential to innovate.
Whereas everybody has the innate means to have interaction in creative thinking and problem solving techniques, there are seven common traits that innovative leaders like da Vinci, Edison, Henry Ford and Steve Jobs share; seven traits that propel them to think outside the confines of conventional wisdom and visualize breakthrough ideas that change the way you and I live and experience the world.
The seven traits of highly innovate thinkers are:
1. Curiosity - Curiosity is step one toward discovery. It's the "newbie's mind," a deep, child-like sense of surprise concerning the world, the relationship between different things and the way they work.
2. Imagination - Before you'll be able to develop a new idea, you must first have the ability to conceive it, to check the very possibility that it may exist. Innovation is fueled by leaps of the creative mind, making novel new connections between seemingly disparate ideas, concepts or objects.
3. Intuition - Making decisions based mostly on info and figures is fine in many instances. But true innovation is more often born from that inner "sense," the guiding force, sixth sense or gut feeling to comply with one's instincts, no matter how unconventional or illogical the direction.
4. Inventiveness - The flexibility to change the status quo requires an inquisitive passion for "tinkering." Innovators possess the need to rearrange and re-organize concepts or issues in new and totally different combinations.
5. Playfulness - It is once you get "lost in your work" that tremendous things begin to happen. Time, self-consciousness, seriousness and any sense of limitation falls away, and challenges are dealt with ease. The attitude of playfulness is, "All things are possible!"
6. Flexibility - The capability to suspend judgment and embrace two (or more) seemingly contradictory or unrelated viewpoints at the same time helps create a dynamic pressure that in the end stimulates inventive resolutions (options).
7. Persistence - All of the inventive expertise on the planet is of no worth when you give up prior to the work getting accomplished. Persistence, the eagerness, willpower and enthusiasm to overcome setbacks and discouragement, allows innovative thinkers to keep making an attempt at new possibilities till success is achieved.
In fact, there is no secret recipe for innovation. It requires an ongoing dedication on the part of a group and the people inside to relentlessly pursue new, better methods of doing business, and to never settle for something lower than the best possible outcome. But these seven key traits are a superb place to begin for building your innovation foundation.
Begin to recognize the people round you who naturally possess these traits, and encourage them to make frequent use of them. And nurture these traits in others who aren't as naturally inclined. Acknowledge and reward creative thinking, responsible risk-taking and questioning the status quo. And very quickly you'll have fostered a thriving culture of innovation which might very likely result in just one thing: greater success.
