I will be in Boston, MA this week for the Front End of Innovation conference May 6-8, 2013 at the Seaport World Trade Center, joining 650+ innovation managers and thought leaders from around the world who are serious about learning more about the front-end of innovation or improving existing innovation efforts.
For those of you are interested, I am planning to hold a FREE Nine Innovation Roles train the trainer session to go with all of the other FREE Nine Innovation Roles resources I offer hear on my web site under ‘Products’. To register your interest please fill out the contact form and make a note in the question field.
I will also be leading some thought provoking panel sessions, sharing new insights, and reconnecting with innovation friends (both old and new) at this always fun and energizing innovation event.
If you’d like to set up a meeting to explore your innovation efforts or needs while I’m there, please contact me.
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I’m proud to share with you the link to my latest radio interview. This time I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with LeAnna J. Carey (@LeannaJCarey), host of the popular radio program The Health Maven – Innovation Talk.
We spend the 30 minutes talking about The Nine Innovation Roles and how organizations around the world are increasingly utilizing The Nine Innovation Roles to help them build more effective innovation teams. Curious which ones I think LeAnna fills or that I see myself typically filling?
It means that for the greater good, I am now providing all of the tools that you need to conduct a Nine Innovation Roles workshop or team meeting inside your organization to enhance the success of your innovation teams – for FREE.
Some people think I’m crazy to help people not hire me, but because of my collaborative and people-centric approach to innovation I would like to give everyone five free gifts:
The Nine Innovation Roles themselves
Downloadable Nine Innovation Roles presentation for team meetings or workshops
Downloadable Nine Innovation Roles Worksheet for gathering data on team makeup
Downloadable Nine Innovation Roles card deck design that I use with Fortune 500 clients
Nine Innovation Roles video for use in team meetings or workshops
The Nine Innovation Roles is one of the most requested workshop topics in the keynotes and masterclasses that I conduct for companies all around the world, and comes directly from my popular book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, that is being used by universities like Creighton and companies like Microsoft and AB Inbev to help establish a common language of innovation.
Here is an excerpt from my book that talks about The Nine Innovation Roles:
“Too often we treat people as commodities that are interchangeable and maintain the same characteristics and aptitudes. Of course, we know that people are not interchangeable, yet we continually pretend that they are anyway — to make life simpler for our reptile brain to comprehend. Deep down we know that people have different passions, skills, and potential, but even when it comes to innovation, we expect everybody to have good ideas.
I’m of the opinion that all people are creative, in their own way. That is not to say that all people are creative in the sense that every single person is good at creating lots of really great ideas, nor do they have to be. I believe instead that everyone has a dominant innovation role at which they excel, and that when properly identified and channeled, the organization stands to maximize its innovation capacity. I believe that all people excel at one of nine innovation roles, and that when organizations put the right people in the right innovation roles, that your innovation speed and capacity will increase.”
I hope you take the time to download and learn and utilize these FREE Nine Innovation Roles resources to improve the success of your innovation efforts and of the innovation teams in your organizations.
“The more successful an organization becomes the bigger it gets. The bigger it gets the more it focuses on optimizing its resources. The more it optimizes it resources the more it eliminates variation. Innovation requires variation. We have seen the enemy and he is us.”
– Jeff DeGraff
“It is in identifying which of The Nine Innovation Roles are vacant (or sub-optimally filled) that you will be able to see some of the areas where your efforts are likely to come up short, and then can take actions to improve your chances of innovation success.”
– Braden Kelley
“It is not enough to simply go through the motions. In order to build our abilities, cognitive or otherwise, we must think about what we’re doing, concentrate while we’re doing it and then review what we have done. Further, we need to seek out mentors and peers who will critique our efforts.”
– Greg Satell
What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?
Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!
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“So healthy paranoia is the friend of innovation. Complacency is the enemy – be ruthless in driving it out of your business.”
– Kevin McFarthing
“There are Nine Innovation Roles that need to be filled on every innovation project team, and filled well, for each individual innovation effort to be successful – and the skills necessary to be successful in each role should be cultivated in the organization.”
– Braden Kelley
“Variation, or hedging as it’s called in the venture capital community, is essential because it accelerates the failure cycle and quickens the discovery of the valuable solution. Innovation requires deviation; deviation requires deviants.”
– Jeff DeGraff
What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?
Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
I’m seeing an increasing number of articles about innovation personalities and the like, and I’m a firm believer that it’s not personalities that matter so much when it comes to innovation, it’s the roles that we play in making innovation happen (or not). So, I would like to add my Nine Innovation Roles to the conversation.
Too often we treat people as commodities that are interchangeable and maintain the same characteristics and aptitudes. Of course, we know that people are not interchangeable, yet we continually pretend that they are anyway — to make life simpler for our reptile brain to comprehend. Deep down we know that people have different passions, skills, and potential, but even when it comes to innovation, we expect everybody to have good ideas.
I’m of the opinion that all people are creative, in their own way. That is not to say that all people are creative in the sense that every single person is good at creating lots of really great ideas, nor do they have to be. I believe instead that everyone has a dominant innovation role at which they excel, and that when properly identified and channeled, the organization stands to maximize its innovation capacity. I believe that all people excel at one of nine innovation roles, and that when organizations put the right people in the right innovation roles, that your innovation speed and capacity will increase.
The Revolutionary is the person who is always eager to change things, to shake them up, and to share his or her opinion. These people tend to have a lot of great ideas and are not shy about sharing them. They are likely to contribute 80 to 90 percent of your ideas in open scenarios.
2. Conscript
The Conscript has a lot of great ideas but doesn’t willingly share them, either because such people don’t know anyone is looking for ideas, don’t know how to express their ideas, prefer to keep their head down and execute, or all three.
3. Connector
The Connector does just that. These people hear a Conscript say something interesting and put him together with a Revolutionary; The Connector listens to the Artist and knows exactly where to find the Troubleshooter that his idea needs.
4. Artist
The Artist doesn’t always come up with great ideas, but artists are really good at making them better.
5. Customer Champion
The Customer Champion may live on the edge of the organization. Not only does he have constant contact with the customer, but he also understands their needs, is familiar with their actions and behaviors, and is as close as you can get to interviewing a real customer about a nascent idea.
6. Troubleshooter
Every great idea has at least one or two major roadblocks to overcome before the idea is ready to be judged or before its magic can be made. This is where the Troubleshooter comes in. Troubleshooters love tough problems and often have the deep knowledge or expertise to help solve them.
7. Judge
The Judge is really good at determining what can be made profitably and what will be successful in the marketplace.
8. Magic Maker
The Magic Maker takes an idea and makes it real. These are the people who can picture how something is going to be made and line up the right resources to make it happen.
9. Evangelist
The Evangelist knows how to educate people on what the idea is and help them understand it. Evangelists are great people to help build support for an idea internally, and also to help educate customers on its value.
As you can see, creating and maintaining a healthy innovation portfolio requires that you develop the organizational capability of identifying what role each individual is best at playing in your organization. It should be obvious that a failure to involve and leverage all nine roles along the idea generation, idea evaluation, and idea commercialization path will lead to suboptimal results. To be truly successful, you must be able to bring in the right roles at the right times to make your promising ideas stronger on your way to making them successful. Most organizations focus too much energy on generating the ideas and not enough on developing their ideas or their people.
If you would prefer, here is a slide deck that I posted to slideshare.net:
Download the simple Nine Innovation Roles Worksheet from my FREE STUFF page and use it in your groups to help understand what innovation roles people tend towards and which ones are underrepresented.
Do you believe these are the roles that drive successful innovation? If not, why not.
I will be in Boston, MA this week for the Front End of Innovation conference May 6-8, 2013 at the Seaport World Trade Center, joining 650+ innovation managers and thought leaders from around the world who are serious about learning more about the front-end of innovation or improving existing innovation efforts.
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
