Who Will Innovate for You?

The success of many companies relies on their ability to innovate effectively. However, most companies identify their best innovators based on their past track record. For example, Procter & Gamble has the Vic Mills Society, which was named for a prolific inventor within the company. It honors scientists who have made repeated discoveries for the company.

It is important to identify the great serial innovators in a company and to give them the space and resources to continue to do great things. However, it would also be useful to identify those people who are likely to be effective innovators at the beginning of their careers to be able to nurture their development.

What qualities are likely to give people innovation potential?

Here are three characteristics that — when found together — are good predictors of someone’s innovation potential. These characteristics are based on the idea that good innovators know a lot about a wide variety of domains and they are good at using that knowledge when faced with a new problem.

  • Openness. Openness is one of the five basic personality characteristics. People who are open are willing to try out new experiences and new ideas. They may not always agree with those ideas, but they are at least willing to consider them.
  • A need for cognition. Need for cognition refers to how much someone really likes to think about things. When combined with openness, the high need for cognition ensures that someone not only considers an idea, but they think it through carefully. That additional thought gives people the opportunity to deeply understand a variety of areas of knowledge that they can use later to solve new problems.
  • An ability to use analogies to solve problems. As I discuss in my book “Smart Thinking,” analogies allow people who are solving a problem in one area to draw on their knowledge of another area. For example, the Swiss engineer George DeMestral designed Velcro using an analogy to cockleburs that stuck to the fur of his dog. People who are good at using analogies have skill at finding the essence of the problem they are solving so that they can find other things they know that use similar principles to solve problems that look different on the surface.

It isn’t guaranteed that people with this combination of skills are going to be great innovators. However, these characteristics provide someone with all the basic tools they need to develop novel solutions to hard problems.

Art Markman, PhD, is the Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin, and the director of the program in the Human Dimensions of Organizations. He has written over 125 research papers on topics related to thinking including reasoning, decision making and motivation. He blogs frequently for Psychology Today, Huffington Post, and Harvard Business Review. His latest book is called “Smart Thinking.”


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