Nine Innovation Roles – A New Tool

In my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, one of the last tools I ended up adding has turned out to be one of the most intriguing parts of the book for people – especially in helping to build successful innovation teams. That tool is the Nine Innovation Roles, which I have written about before on this blog.

Now, after my latest innovation speech at the Farm Credit Services of America in Omaha, Nebraska and some conversations I had with the leadership there, it has become clear that people would like to have some additional tools to use to help identify which roles people tend towards on their teams so that they can use these tendencies as talking points and possibly to help organize effective innovation teams.

Nine Innovation Roles - A New ToolOne of the things that was discussed as a possibility was having team members fill out a simple worksheet to identify what roles they believe their teammates tend towards, while also self-identifying themselves. If the whole team were to complete this exercise it should yield some interesting and actionable data.

But why stop there with one organization?

I truly believe in the power of the Nine Innovation Roles, and because of this belief I’ve created and uploaded a simple worksheet for people to use. I only ask one thing in return from those who download and use the worksheet.

  1. Please send info at braden kelley dot com the data you collect (without the names)
  2. In exchange I will collect it and share it in aggregate at the end of every quarter

YOU MUST DOWNLOAD THE WORKSHEET FOR IT TO BE USEFUL

In case you missed it, the Nine Innovation Roles are:

  1. Revolutionary
  2. Artist
  3. Troubleshooter
  4. Conscript
  5. Connector
  6. Customer Champion
  7. Judge
  8. Magic Maker
  9. Evangelist

In addition to providing you a pre-built worksheet you can customize and send out to your teams, the worksheet also has embedded in it definitions of the nine roles and the columns on the data entry tab have comments with the definitions as well or people can click the column headers to jump to the tab with a definition (yes, there are tabs that define each of the nine roles).

Please also feel free to share any observations from your use of the Nine Innovation Roles in your organization.

For more information about the Nine Innovation Roles, please get some copies of my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire for your team or check out my previous article highlighting them.

Happy innovating!

Special Bonus

Download 'Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire' sample chapterIf you’ve read all the way to the bottom, then you deserve a free sample chapter from my new book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire. I hope you enjoy the sample chapter and consider purchasing the book as a way of supporting the future growth of this community.

Download the sample chapter

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