Thursday, September 7, 2017

Three “E” Traits in Innovators

Innovative organizations create the environment for providing time, space, and freedom to create, inspire creativity, appreciate originality.

We are all born to be creative, innovativeness is the state of mind. And creativity is most wanted professional quality today. Creativity is both nature and nurtured, you can no longer afford to just talk about creativity and innovation; you must do it and practice it. From innovation management perspective, you have to walk the talk and shape the working environment to inspire the purpose, recognize your innovators, and unleash the genius of your employees. Here are three “E” traits in innovators.


Emotion: There is a new energy that gets created in teams engaged in the innovation, both at an individual and a group level. There is an emotion cycle in an innovation management life cycle! For example, the certain level of conflict or dissatisfaction can spark innovation, participating in innovation leads to self-awareness, self-driven, and self-actualization. Tenacity helps to follow your dream; patience relates to tolerance of risk;, trust helps to build a collaborative team to innovate, and happiness can make innovation more fun etc, they are all positive emotional ingredients to trigger innovation. There is an emotional cycle in an innovation scenario. There is no single emotional impact associated with innovation, it's a whole spectrum of emotion - be passionate to solve problems, be curious to ask questions, be patient to overcome the change; be empathetic to understand the other’s point of view; and be exhilarated to grow and think better ways to do things. Emotions keep people engaging in the thorny journey of innovation, makes people believe they can bring in a lot more to their work than they thought they were capable of.


Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurship is often defined as risk taking, and being innovative. The heart of entrepreneurship is about changes because digital means the faster pace of changes. Though motives of entrepreneurs are different, generally speaking, entrepreneurs are driven by doing things more creatively and wish to make great achievement as well. Digital is the age of options, it provides the opportunity for people to think the new way to do things, so it forces digital professionals to be equipped with an entrepreneur’s mindset, to expand their thinking boxes, and get really creative on solving the emergent or old problems in new ways, and figure out which of them makes sense to challenge and then using creativity tools (exploring, divergence, convergence) to arrive at a useful new box. From innovation management perspective, Corporate Entrepreneurship has been recognized as a potentially viable means for promoting and sustaining organizational performance, renewal and corporate competitiveness. The new businesses require innovation, innovation requires fresh ideas, and fresh ideas require Mavericks. Corporate Entrepreneurship is embodying risk taking, proactiveness and radical changes.


Eureka: The ‘Eureka’ moment refers to that joyous exciting moment when what was perplexing and contradictory suddenly falls into place. The eureka moment is that when a valid idea generalization emerges. Creativity happens in both unconscious and conscious level. On a bigger scale, there is the thought that we are creating our experience moment to moment, bringing our reality into existence as we go. When we explore the mental process of acquiring new knowledge through thoughts, experiences, and senses. The actual “thinking” is a conscious or nonconscious effort to reorganize your memories (meanings) and integrate newly acquired knowledge (new meanings) into fresh insight. The conscious effort employs and tries to expand one’s attention span to stay focused on the wide range of meanings (memories) in order to reconcile them into a coherent whole. Innovators do not just reactively wait for the Eureka moment, but proactively practicing creative thinking, discover easy solutions to complex problems, and awaken to exploit the hidden resources that everyone has within her/himself, to be able to get the most out of themselves and those around them.


Innovators are among us. Innovative organizations create the environment for providing time, space, and freedom to create, inspire creativity, appreciate originality. Organizations no matter large or small, all face the unprecedented change, uncertainty, velocity, and accelerated business dynamic, innovation becomes the key differentiator to survive and thrive.





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