Not surprisingly, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists trend strongly toward the first stage of the innovation process, generation, and learning through direct experience (their dots are largely on top of the grid). However, running a successful business involves much more than simply coming up with an idea and implementing it.  This group needs conceptualizers and optimizers – the people who tend to be more product-focused.  Entrepreneurs and startups have to be aware of where they have shortcomings. If this group were an intact team, it might be more focused on jumping from an idea (generation) to a solution (implementation), defining and solving the true customer problem, and product quality might be impacted negatively. 

This cohort of MBA students, who were part of a venture capital group, had to learn the complete innovation process to develop their ideas fully. Generators may benefit from partnering with people with different inclinations if starting their own companies. By understanding the innovation process, these students learned the value of all styles.

While this group strongly represented generators, the style is the least common in society. Generators are also highly underrepresented in the business world and often need to be more understood by their colleagues. But while they don’t always fit easily into the corporate world, they can have a significant impact on old-fashioned companies if given an opportunity to offer ideas for new products or markets.

What ideas might you offer these students as they enter the real world?

“You’re an innovator; you just don’t know it yet!” Learn more about the Basadur Profile and how it measures cognitive diversity to help your team achieve innovative results. 

At a pan-national symposium of Lean Six Sigma leaders, the Basadur Profile was offered to 79 delegates before a workshop. As the scatter diagram shows, most attendees have innovation styles that support solution development and implementation – the optimization and implementation stages of the innovation process. 

Not surprisingly, these people are typically hired to make current processes more efficient and effective by removing costs and improving consistency. People who lead Lean Six Sigma initiatives are good at bringing about small and incremental organizational changes. We are not here to devalue these changes or innovations, as they often increase employee engagement, productivity, and profitability.  In many legacy companies, even small incremental changes take work.

But when the search for short-term profitability isn’t accompanied by long-term visioning, a company’s future can be endangered. With few generators and conceptualizers, this group isn’t likely to create disruptive innovation or discontinuous change. When you consider that a majority of the companies in the current S&P 5000 Index didn’t exist 20 years ago, the significance of this problem is hard to ignore. “Innovate or stagnate” might be this scatter diagram’s inherent message.

What might you recommend to these delegates?

You’re an innovator, you just don’t know it yet!” Learn more about the Basadur Profile and how it measures cognitive diversity to support your team in achieving innovative results.

US MidWest department fire fighters,…literally!

Like air traffic controllers, firefighters are intensely inclined toward implementation. In their daily problem solving activities, firefighters confront situations that need their immediate action towards saving lives or resolving dangerous situations. As one firefighter said, “In a fire emergency, we have no time to ‘reflect’ on the fire – we just need to put it out and save lives.”

But this department – including the new fire chief and his lieutenants – also felt it had antiquated views and lacked a vision or strategy for the future. As mostly implementers, the team was struggling to create a new strategy and develop action plans – a task that tends to be conceptualizer work. With facilitation, the team established its vision of becoming an elite department and developed a survey questionnaire to distribute to department members as a fact-finding tool.

A two-day workshop led to the development of a long-term vision supported by six action pillars. Committees were then created to drive each action forward. Although a majority of implementers, facilitation allowed the team to work methodically through the process to create a strategy they all bought into. 

“You’re an innovator, you just don’t know it yet!” Learn more about the Basadur Profile and how it measures cognitive diversity to support your team in achieving innovative results. 

We are fortunate to have many professors use the Basadur Profile in their teaching – they come from all faculties including engineering, business, architecture and art and design.  This scatter diagram is made up of students from a Masters program in strategic foresight and innovation.  Most of the students come from a graphic or industrial design background. 

Design people tend to be very much on the right hand side of the Basadur Profile scatter diagram and are attracted to programs like strategy foresight. The stages of innovation they tend to prefer are generation and conceptualization.  When we get a chance to work with the students directly, we encourage them by helping them understand that innovation is not just coming up with new ideas but involves all four stages of the process. It also requires teamwork and allowing others to help make ideas more practical and bring them to fruition.

Design students need to be reminded that they will likely be working with many people with left hand side orientations as they move forward in their careers.  In fact, almost 70% of people who take the Profile prefer the optimization and implementation stages of the process.  When we compare scatter diagrams, it’s a very powerful and visual way to get the students better prepared for the corporate world they are about to enter.  It also helps them showcase how they are different and what types of careers and jobs might be better suited to them.

What else might you recommend to these students?

Embrace your diversity – conceptualizers help define problems/opportunities with a superior angle.  These design students who graduate from this program are highly specialized to help future employers come up with more unique and differentiating ideas, especially for organizations looking to disrupt their marketplaces with new innovations.

“You’re an innovator, you just don’t know it yet!” Learn more about the Basadur Profile and how it measures cognitive diversity to support your team in achieving innovative results.