What do you do when certain innovation styles are in short supply on your team?

Understanding the importance of each of the four innovation styles and their roles in empowering teams is instrumental to organizational innovation and success. Optimizers and Implementers are the third and fourth (they appear on the left hand side of the scatter diagram) innovation styles necessary to get things done which is often the effective planning and implementation of new innovative ideas.

The Team 

A new managing director of a stagnant medium-sized European manufacturing company had been hired specifically to help the company find a badly needed breakthrough product and bring it to market. He assembled a team that, in very little time, developed an exciting new product concept. But the team subsequently ground to a standstill. Members failed to attend meetings regularly, with several suggesting nothing important remained to be done. 

What’s missing? 

The profile was administered to all team members. Analysis showed that all the team members intuitively selected by the managing director were either generators or conceptualizers that resulted in a team that was strongly biased towards utilizing knowledge for ideation, making it strong for developing new ideas. But the team lacked optimizers and implementers. 

What could they have done? 

The managing director realized he needed to strengthen the team’s orientation towards utilizing knowledge for evaluation, in order to bring the new product concept to market. When change starts and then stalls, the reason may be an incomplete team. Ambitious leaders need to anticipate this and build the best possible teams to move innovative thinking all the way into effective implementation. 

If this happened to you, what might you do? 

Here are some ideas:

1. Train existing people in the team on how to become better in Optimizing and Implementing. 
2. Incentivize people for Optimizing and Implementing. 
3. Add people in the team who are Optimizers and Implementers.

Great ideas are just that if they don’t get put into action.  Optimizers and implementers are crucial to the innovation process.  By recognizing the importance of these people and having a tool to measure the innovation styles within your team, you will foster better collaboration and execute projects like a champion. 

“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. 

Ready to take The Profile?