Discover Your Corporate Innovation Style

Understand How You & Your Team Solve Problems & Innovate

Not Enough Generators?

Introduction

Sometimes organizations are naturally skewed. It makes perfect sense. If people hire people much like themselves there is often an imbalance that occurs in most organizations. When there is this natural preferred style, it can make the company great in fewer of the required styles to make a company truly innovative.

Let’s see what can happen in an organization that focuses on implementing only. What’s interesting is that you can have all of the go getters in the world but if there is not a continual pipeline of innovation, the opportunity to “go get” can dry up.

The Team

A large global engineering company serving the airline and aerospace industries was struggling to implement an aggressive new growth strategy that is dependent on developing new products and entering new markets.

During training sessions to familiarize employees with creative problem solving, the Profile was administered to a large number of employees. Most managers and professionals were found to be very strongly oriented toward the optimization and implementation styles. This is an absolutely typical training group from the company.

Team Innovation Style Map

What’s Missing?

Not one generator. A strong organizational culture favouring analysis and quick fixes to short-term efficiency problems is reflected in the company’s motto: “We’re on it.” That attitude rewards implementers, whose efforts can be seen in hands-on actions. But there’s not enough incentive in this company for people with strength in the generator style.

What Did They Do?

To develop a larger number of new projects, the company instituted an extensive training program to develop awareness of and skills in generation and conceptualization. It also created a corporate program that provided significant financial incentives for all business units to propose new projects for developing new products and markets.