Who are your Future Innovators?

Who are your organization’s future innovators, and how can you help them acquire the skills they’ll need to succeed?

These questions are central to building a successful innovation learning program. Selecting participants wisely and crafting powerful learning experiences for them can make the difference between breaking into new markets or achieving market leadership, and being outmoded by your competitors.

Three things any professional needs to innovate

Let’s choose an example employee to work with. We’ll call him Bob. Scratch that...let’s call her Milena. Milena is a team leader in the business development unit of an enterprise tech company, Enterprise Tech Inc. Her deliverables don’t include radical innovation. She needs to meet sales quotas. Exceeding them gets her a bonus and extra vacation days (progressive incentivising, Enterprise Tech!). What Milena doesn’t get is permission to try wildly new things.

The first thing Milena needs to innovate is opportunity. This often comes in the form of permission, a deliverable on a job description or explicit encouragement from a director or manager.

In Milena’s case, she may not have the opportunity to try some radical innovation with her team, but they might benefit by making incremental improvements to their processes, or from experimenting with new ways of engaging potential clients. From a learning perspective, experimentation and process improvement might be good learning categories for Milena and her team.

Three years later, Milena’s hard work helped bring some large new clients to Enterprise Tech. Milena makes director! Now she runs business development for all of Eastern Europe.

Milena makes a healthy director’s salary, business is humming along beautifully, and her kids are in their tweens. Her department consistently hits their goals, and exceeds them on occasion. Milena continues to work long hours, but she is committed to spending time with her children before they leave the nest. Milena’s new role offers her the opportunity to innovate, but in her current stage of life, the motivation isn’t there. In order to do something new and meaningful, you have to want it badly.

A few more years go by. Milena has recently transitioned her successor into her departmental director role, and transferred into a new position leading a small team of growth hackers (Wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_hacking) looking for ways to break into new markets. Her kids are in college now and Milena loves her new role. She has a fire kindling in her belly.

Now she has the motivation and the opportunity to take big risks and try new things. The third thing she needs to innovative is imagination; to take joy in thinking differently about things. She needs to be able to keep an open mind, learn quickly and adapt her team’s approach and strategies. Advanced creative thinking skills would be useful to her now as well as the capacity to build strong business cases for innovative projects. The ability to socialize bold ideas in the organization would be useful for her as well. Understanding risk management for business innovation might also serve Milena well in her new role.

To sum up, professionals need three things to innovate:

1. Opportunity - permission or encouragement to innovate
2. Motivation - a deep desire or drive
3. Imagination - a taste for thinking differently

Selecting Participants

Selecting participants for an innovation learning program involves many factors. Matching up the skills you want to instill with the opportunities participants have for innovation is one filter for selecting participants. Keeping an eye out for people with imagination and drive is another.

If radical innovation is not one of their deliverables, don’t teach advanced creative thinking techniques.

If your organization is seeking not only to train specific people in innovation, but to change the culture of the organization at large to support innovation, you’ll want to select for mavens and influencers who might carry their learnings and shifts-in-attitude to their peers.

If your organization does not support lone wolf innovation, you’ll want to select for good interpersonal and collaboration skills. You’ll also want to train participants on processes and models for group innovation.

If your organization is seeking truly radical innovation from its high potential groups, you’ll want to train them in various intrepreneurial skills, preferably in the wild (more on training in the wild in a future article).

There are many other factors to consider as well. Identifying and nurturing innovation potential is no simple task, but it is worth it. Organizations that cannot find it in themselves to innovate will be disrupted by those who can.

Please write to us if you have ideas or questions you’d like us to respond to directly ([email protected]), and best of luck innovating!

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