How do you rate as an innovator?

Did you know that you can develop the skills and behaviours that lie at the heart of being innovative?

To be more innovative, you have to have good habits and behave like an innovator. In their book The Innovator’s DNA, Dyer, Gregersen and Christensen state that ‘…innovative thinkers connect fields, problems, or ideas that others find unrelated’. The authors have identified four discovery skills that ‘trigger associational thinking by helping innovators increase their stock of building block ideas from which innovative ideas spring’.  The four key skills are:

Questioning: innovative people always ask ‘why’ and they love to challenge the status quo

Observing: innovative people pick up on the smallest of details in how people behave and the ways in which things are done giving them food for thought.

Networking: innovative people invest time in linking up with people from different backgrounds and with different expertise and they learn from them.

Experimenting: innovative people constantly explore new ways of doing things and experiences.

These four key skills together have a mutually reinforcing impact on the fifth skill: associative thinking or the ability to make connections.

Find out which habits and behaviours are already working well for you when it comes to innovation and identify those  that could do with a little work. Practise them, gain confidence and then apply them to play your own part in driving innovation.

Take our short questionnaire and  “Check Your Innovator Behaviour”.