 Commentary by Ellen Domb Subscribe via Email or RSS |  Biography |
February 18, 2010
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Creativity and Risk-taking Competencies for Innovation |
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Can you teach other people to be innovators? Or can you teach yourself to be more innovative? TRIZ practioners learn to generate innovative ideas, but they don't always get their ideas adopted in their organizations. Sarah Miller Caldicott is co-author of Innovate Like Edison and author of a very good blog on innovation: http://www.powerpatterns.com/newsletter/newsletter_jan2010_online.htm This month she combines some of her experience and Edison-based research with the work of Dr. Jacqueline Byrd on innovation in 14,000 organizations. I won't repeat the full research discussion -- see Caldicott's blog or Byrd's book for more details, but some of the exercises may help TRIZ Journal/Real Innovation readers see why I think this is research that will help. Byrd finds that there are 8 corporate competencies that interplay with each other in the course of innovation, that can be defined on a two-axis matrix of Creativity vs. Risk-taking, with the 5.1% who are high on both parameters identified as the Innovators. She finds that there are 4 ways to encourage creativity and 3 ways to encourage risk-taking. The other corporate competencies have their own ratios of creativity to risk-taking (for example, the Challenger is high on risk-taking but low on creativity, and the Synthesizer is high on creativty and mid-level on risk-taking.) Future issues of the newsletter will look at ways to improve these competencies, and the interplay between them. Weaving Caldicott's research on how Edison brought new people into his research lab with Byrd's research on 14,000 companies should give us all some new insights into the process of learning innovation. |
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Comments [2] | Permalink |
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| Categories: Methodology | |
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| posted by Jack Hipple [ http://www.innovation-triz.com ] | March 9, 2010 at 7:54 am |
We need to be very careful with the word "competency". This implies a skill level of some sort. I am surprised at the lack of mention in this work of the research of Dr. Michael Kirton, which generated the Kirton KAI(R) assessment instrument, clearly shows that there are "preferences" in creativity and problem solving styles (as opposed to competency). Some people are very adaptive and structured in their creativity (think Edison) and others are out of the box (think DaVinci). Both are creative but in very different ways. Trying to get an "adoptive" creative to become "out of the box" creative has the same difficulty as turning a cat's behavior into a dog's. It's possible, but not without a great deal of labotomy change or reprogamming. This is part of the problem we are seeing in organizations trying to transition from Six Sigma to "innovation". You hire people of one sort and then expect them to behave differently when the corporate mission changes. Not impossible, but a great deal of valium helps. We need to recognize that there are fundamental behavioral characteristics and preferences that are very hard wired. We need to use them and not reprogram them. |
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| posted by Bill Burnett [ http://www.innovationceo.com ] | March 22, 2010 at 3:37 pm |
Comment on a comment, Jack, I think you are absolutely right about trying to make an innovator out of an adoptive. As Kirton points out, some people are more comfortable tweaking the solutions we already have, while other want to throw out what we have and start fresh. It is a little ironic that Six Sigma creates this conflict with innovation considering its history. Back when Robert Galvin ran Motorola, they created Six Sigma as a way to deal with Japanese competition, but were extraordinarily good at balancing its disciplines with practices around something Galvin refers to as the "We". Innovation was a more powerful influence on the culture under Galvin than Six Sigma. But Six Sigma became such a popular product outside Motorola, that eventually they began drinking the koolaid themselves. |
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