28 Aug 2011

Creativity II - Innovation

An ENTP's idea?

Clay Christensen publishes this month “The Innovator’s DNA”, a book co-written with Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen. According to reviews it is a well-researched attempt to take us inside the minds of successful innovators. It also seems to not quite escape the commercial urge to spice up organisational research with self-help narrative: "anyone can become more innovative".

According to Amazon's product description, Mr Christensen and his colleagues' research identifies "five capabilities demonstrated by the best innovators:
  • Associating: drawing connections between questions, problems, or ideas from unrelated fields
  • Questioning: posing queries that challenge common wisdom
  • Observing: scrutinizing the behavior of customers, suppliers, and competitors to identify new ways of doing things
  • Experimenting: constructing interactive experiences and provoking unorthodox responses to see what insights emerge
  • Networking: meeting people with different ideas and perspectives" (see other reviews)
Very sensible and common-sensical, but also vaguely familiar. Consider the following list of attributes (from here and here):
  • "ability to identify patterns"
  • "approach problems and theories ignoring existing rules and opinions"
  • "insatiably curious"
  • "see everything in terms of what it could be turned into"
  • "love to discuss these concepts with others"
The above are elements of the Myers-Briggs INTP type (you can have an informal go at finding your type here). ENTPs also enjoy some of the characteristics described by Mr Christensen (they are many times called "the innovators").

Judgement over the Myers-Briggs model and the above assimilation aside, there are studies that link personality and innovation. A longitudinal study of 180 employees (Seibert, Kraimer and Crant, 2001) showed that a proactive personality - the tendency to identify and act on opportunities, take the initiative and persevere - is positively related to innovation. Proactivity is also linked to the Big Five of personality: There are studies that show significant relationships between proactivity and extroversion and concientiousness (Crant, 1995).

There is, obviously, thinking against considering innovation a personality trait. There is also greater complexity to be considered when breaking the innovation process into stages (Damian Killen and Gareth Williams, authors of "Introduction to Type and Innovation", propose that each require strengths that can be linked to different personality types).

If innovation is to a significant degree indeed a produce of personality, maybe we can all learn to behave like innovators, but would the effort render us or our organisations a worthwhile return?

"Don't tell me what I can't do"

From an individual perspective I applaud the humanistic notion of "all is possible if you want it badly enough". From an organisational perspective it might be more sensible perhaps to smoke out and entice the naturals.

1 comment:

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