We are all unique individuals. Each one of us has different habits, talents, knowledge, values, interests, and ways of expressing ourselves. And, while we all have the capacity to be innovative, we approach innovation and change in different ways.

You may like to build on your past experience, or maybe you prefer a vision to guide you. You might enjoy putting together unusual combinations of things. Or perhaps you like to throw caution to the wind and explore the unknown.

Recognizing the different ways we like to innovate is a key to working together successfully – in a group or in an organization. We all have our own unique approach to meeting a creative challenge, using our own mixture of four Innovation Styles:

• Visioning: to envision the ideal future
• Modifying: to refine and optimize what has come before
• Exploring: to discover new and novel possibilities
• Experimenting: to combine and test many unique combinations

The Innovation Styles Profile is a personal self-assessment that shows how you prefer to promote innovation and change through your own unique mixture of all four styles. The insights and tools contained here will help you fully bring out and optimize your own innovativeness. In addition, it will guide you in developing the insight, versatility and impact you need to bring out the innovative best from other members of your workgroup and your overall organization.

The Innovation Styles Profile does not measure your ‘level’ of innovativeness. Rather it shows your approach to or strategy for innovation.

By developing your awareness, knowledge and skillful practice of the Innovation Styles, you can benefit in many ways…

Strengthen your confidence and versatility

Each Innovation Style gives you a different way to meet new challenges. By learning to use all four styles, you will be more open, flexible, and self-confident when taking on a work challenge – and when designing your own career!

Build harmonious teams

Each member of your team has a different blend of Innovation Styles. Once you understand how these styles influence their innovativeness, you’ll understand your teammates better. You’ll be able to select an innovative mix of people, gain higher participation, reduce relationship tension, and build more synergy on your teams. You’ll be easier to work with, and so will they.

Find innovative solutions to your everyday work challenges

No matter what kind of work you do – such as marketing, product development, customer service, operations, sales, etc. – there’s a process for getting your work done. Innovation Styles can boost your success at each and every stage of those processes. You end up more engaged and enabled to find the innovative solutions that make the biggest difference for you and your organization.

• Strategic planning
• New product / service development
• Sales and marketing
• Getting ideas from customers
• Organizational change
• Quality / process improvement

Sell your ideas

Building innovative relationships or having creative ideas is only the starting point – action is the key to making a real difference. Learn to speak other people’s “language of innovation,” and you’ll be more effective in getting them to buy in to your innovation ideas.

Help your organization become more successful

Organizations have a blend of Innovation Styles too. Understanding your organization’s style pattern helps you anticipate its response to change and find ways to contribute to its overall success.

The Innovation Styles Profile is based upon three premises:

1. Each of us has the ability to be innovative. Therefore, the main issue is not “Am I innovative?” but rather “HOW am I innovative?”

2. As individuals, we may have equal potential for being innovative, yet have different approaches to the process of innovation

3. We do not use a single approach, but a mixture of four different styles

Therefore, the profile does not measure your level of innovativeness. Rather, it measures your tendency, disposition, and preference to use the four different approaches to innovation and change. You might have a low tendency to use one style, yet still be quite capable of using that style when you choose to. Also, you can gain even more versatility for using all four styles without having to change your preference for any one style.

The concept of Innovation Styles is much broader than the “creative thinking styles” that teach “left-brain” and “right-brain” ways of thinking. Each Innovation Style is a fundamentally different approach to driving the process of innovation and change – taking on a challenge, focusing on key priorities, reaching breakthroughs, and implementing solutions. Thus, each Innovation Style is like a language: while you may most easily express yourself in one way, you can learn to “speak” all four.

Even though you may have one primary Innovation Style, your profile shows how you tend to use all four styles. You’ll notice that the styles are not labeled as “Modifi-er,” Experiment-er,” etc., as if the styles denote “a type of person” who uses only one style. Instead, by using the terms “Modify-ing,” “Experiment-ing,” etc., the styles depict approaches to innovation and strategies of thinking that can be flexibly applied in your work.

The questions in the Innovation Styles Profile are asked with a specific context in mind: “How do you handle challenges best at work?”

Why is this important? Sometimes, the pressures of a particular job, challenge, or work culture might demand a certain style. Sometimes, we may act differently at home vs. at work. And sometimes we might simply change over time. By answering the survey questions with respect to your recent work experience, your profile reflects a real-time “snapshot” of your preferred approaches to innovation within your present circumstances… and you can gain important insights and practical ideas about how to be successful right here, right now, with the people you work with.

From the Innovation Styles questionnaire, you will receive two different kinds of feedback graphs. The first, the “Innovation Styles Kite,” gives you a clear way to see the relative degree to which you prefer each of the four styles in relation to each other. The second, the “Point” graph, shows the average point between your Visioning / Experimenting and your Modifying / Exploring scores. It is like the “center of gravity” for your “kite” profile.” When your “point” is put on a graph with other people’s points, you can gain insights on the group dynamics for innovation.

The numerical value of each score does not indicate a level of innovativeness. Rather, each score indicates the strength of your tendency, disposition and preference among these four distinct approaches to innovation. The higher your raw score for a particular style, the more strongly you prefer to use that style.

• If a score is 44 or greater, you have a strong tendency to use that style

• If a score is 39 to 43, you have a moderate tendency to use that style

• If a score is 32 to 38, your tendency for that style is balanced by its “opposite” style

Remember, your score is based on a self-assessment at one point in time, within your present work environment. So, your results depend on your level of self-awareness. Though it is our experience that a major shift in profile is very rare, both your self-awareness and your preferences may change over time

There are two dimensions that form the four Innovation Styles:

1. What stimulates and inspires this style’s innovativeness? Facts, details, and analysis… or Intuition, insights and images
2. How does this style approach the innovation process? Focused, decisive, and outcome- oriented… or Broad, perceptive, and learning-oriented

Each Innovation Style combines these two dimensions in a unique way.

“Let’s develop a clear sense of purpose and goals to focus and drive the creative energy.”

Some people like to focus on the long-term end-result. They have a vision of what they want to create and are comfortable letting their goals be their guide. They emphasize the Visioning style. People who favor the Visioning style are persistent, determined, hard working and visionary as they provide a group with direction, inspiration, and momentum. They trust their instincts and like to make decisions. Driven by their long-term goals and their organization’s mission, they seek solutions that focus on maximizing future potential.

When Stephen Arnold was General Manager of the Education and Games Division at Lucasfilm Limited, he used the Visioning style to meet his immediate business needs, to lead his industry, and to set the goals that could change the face of education: As a production organization, we're trying to design and develop exciting and successful entertainment and education products using interactive technology. Our bigger business purpose is actually to evolve the state of the art in interactive media. I do in fact go out into the future and figure out what it ought to be like. Then I turn around and look back to see what the pathway is, from the present to that future.

In 1213, a group of English barons banded together with a common vision: to limit the absolute power of the king and to promise justice to all free men in the kingdom. They presented a document to King John, who refused to sign it. It took two years and the force of an army to convince the king to sign this cornerstone of English liberty and democracy, the Magna Carta in 1215.

"If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine, I'll do it myself."

With that determined proclamation, Josephine Cochrane, wife of an Illinois politician in the 1880's, set out to invent a major kitchen appliance - not because Mrs. Cochrane was fed up with the humdrum chore of dirty dishes; she was a wealthy woman with a full staff of servants. Josephine Cochrane frequently gave formal dinners and was tired of servants breaking her expensive china. Every party ended with shattered dishes, which took months to replace by mail. A machine seemed like an ideal solution. 

In a woodshed adjoining her home, she measured her dinnerware and then fashioned individual wire compartments for plates, saucers, and cups. The compartments fastened around the circumference of a wheel that rested in a large, copper boiler. As a motor turned the wheel, hot soapy water squirted up from the bottom of the boiler and showered the dinnerware. The design was crude but effective and so impressed her circle of friends that they dubbed the invention the "Cochrane Dishwasher" and placed orders for machines for their kitchens.

The following are questions you might use or adapt for generating ideas using the Visioning Style:

• What is the ideal outcome?
• What do we really want?
• What do our customers hope for?
• What is our vision?
• What will the world look like in 10 years?
• What would inspire us?
• What should it look like?

“Let’s challenge assumptions and see where we end up.”

Some people prefer to explore uncharted territory. They thrive on the unknown and unpredictable, often coming up with ideas from totally new assumptions. They emphasize the Exploring style. People who prefer the Exploring style are adventurous, dislike routine, and like to be challenged. They often try to reopen the idea-generation process even when others might be trying to come to a decision. They tend to add a sense of adventure to any project and open up the potential for dramatic breakthroughs.

When John Gooden was Vice President of Design and Marketing for Design West Incorporated, he used the Exploring style to develop a new automobile seat for General Motors:

There was a particular ergonomic sports seat that had moving side-bolsters. These bolsters had the ability to “hug” the body, if you want that confined feeling for sports-car-like maneuvering. We were having a tremendous problem where a piece of plastic came together with a piece of material. If that area moved, children could possibly trap their hands. We were really at our wits end to come up with an idea.

To give himself time to think more clearly, John went sailing. He was pondering the problem, seeking some new insight. Suddenly…

A California gray whale came up beside the boat and took a big breath. That's an awesome experience. And at the time that it surfaced, I glanced over and there was the belly of this whale with this fluted structure on it, expanding and contracting. And I said to myself, “That’s it!” We can have the side-bolsters move in the same fashion as the belly of the whale.

Elias Howe spent years trying to invent a machine that could sew. He sacrificed everything he owned as he tried out many new ideas. Nothing worked. One evening in 1846, when he was about to give up his search, he fell asleep and dreamed of his creditors dressed as savages coming to avenge his failure.

They were attacking him with spears. But in his dream the spears had holes in their points. This image changed everything he had assumed in his designs, and he awoke knowing that he had found a solution to making a sewing machine work.

In 1965, a Yale student named Frederick W. Smith articulated an idea in a junior-year class project. The concept, the teacher told him, was interesting but not feasible. He got a "C" for the project. 

Smith's concept was guaranteed overnight package delivery. At the heart of his idea was a hub-and-spokes system. Smith suggested that a freight-forwarding company could draw a circle around an airport, which would act as a hub; a number of truck routes inside the circle would be the spokes. All day, trucks would gather parcels from businesses that wanted the packages sent quickly someplace else in the United States. At the end of the day, all spokes would lead back to one airplane. The truck drivers and pilot would fill the airplane with the packages; the loaded plane would fly to a bigger hub somewhere in the center of the country -- Memphis would be perfect. Airplane routes to Memphis -- from Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, ... -- would be the big spokes. The planes would be emptied in Memphis, the packages sorted, and the planes reloaded with packages destined for only their city, to which they would return. Before the sun was up, that city's fleet of trucks would deliver the packages inside the circle and gather another batch for delivery the next day. 

Between 1971 and 1975, Smith fell $30 million in debt, was indicted for bank fraud, got sued by his own family and saw his investors replace him. Yet with incredible vision, persistence, leadership and courage, he was able to build FedEx into the premier carrier of high-priority goods in the marketplace and the standard setter for the industry it established. (For more on the fascinating story of Smith and Federal Express, check out Breakthroughs! by P. Ranganath Nayak and John M. Ketteringham at www.amazon.com.) Smith challenged several assumptions with his idea, including: packages should be sent using the shortest possible route between two points and customers were not interested in overnight delivery.

The following are questions you might use or adapt for generating ideas using the Exploring Style:

• How could we reinvent the rules of competition?
• What could we do that would be totally different?
• What assumptions can we challenge?
• What would be exciting?
• What brand new ideas can we come up with?
• What if this problem were like a ...?
• What aren't we seeing because we're too close to the problem?
• How can we get totally new perspectives on this challenge?

“Let’s see what happens if we take existing elements and combine them in new ways.”

Some people prefer to experiment. Once they agree on a common process or approach to understanding a situation, they can troubleshoot anything. They emphasize the Experimenting style. People who favor the Experimenting style are curious, practical, and good at getting input from everyone concerned. They contribute to a group by being systematic and thorough in formulating and evaluating new ideas – all the while building consensus for a practical solution. They emphasize information gathering and analysis as they seek solutions by applying pre-established processes and trial-and-error.

Jerry Pierce was head of the Electronics Technology Laboratory for SRI International when he used the Experimenting style in the invention of an improved computer disk:

I had worked with both optical and magnetic disks for a long time. But this was not a planned invention. When I started using an optical disk to store information, I found out how much space was being used and how slow it was. So I knew it wasn’t going to work. Then in a meeting with a client, I began to invent as I went along. I said, “Why don't you take the existing technology and combine it with the new technology, where the magnetic side would store the directory and current files and the optical side would store the massive archival data… and it’s transparent to the user. Then you would have a removable disk with the speed of the hard disk.”

In 1878, thirty-one-year-old Thomas Alva Edison announced to the public that he would invent a safe and inexpensive electric light in six weeks. However, it turned out that Edison worked for well over a year on the invention. He experimented with countless materials as filaments, including gold, fishing line, and even hairs that he plucked from the beards of unsuspecting visitors. In the autumn of 1879, Edison discovered that a charred cotton thread would burn for thirteen and a half hours. He invented what the reporters called “a wondrous bulb that lit without a match and glowed without a flame” – the electric light bulb.

There are many popular philosophies to strategy development: “aim for a bold vision”; “build on what you know”; “change the rules”; “give your customers a choice.” Each of these, by itself, tends to employ just one Innovation Style; using only one or two approaches can leave out other important considerations.

There are many other uses and more information on the Innovation Styles.To learn more, download a 28-page booklet entitled Understanding and Applying Innovation Styles that includes an extensive explanation of the styles and their practical applications, as well as how to enhance the innovation process, optimize group innovation, and develop an innovative organization (PDF file in English).