Innovators

People with creative intelligence can figure out better ways to do things, not for winning a small battle of ego, but to achieve innovation excellence.

Digital disruptions are inevitable, and digital transformation is unstoppable. Keeping digital fit means either individuals or organizations need to keep exploring their inner strength, develop unique capabilities to achieve high performance either today or the future. 

Creativity is one of the most needed professional capabilities. How can organizations hire, retain, and recognize innovators who are those energetic individuals with the types of unique characteristics to help organizations catalyze the culture of creativity and create an optimal environment for innovation?

Intellectual curiosity: Intellectual curiosity is one of the key ingredients to spark innovation. Listening to others' input with humility may be useful to facilitate deep empathy which, in turn, facilitates creativity seeds. Truly curious people are more interested in what they don't know, present creatively disruptive traits, ask great questions to embrace diverse viewpoints, disrupt old ways, and inspire alternative ways to do things.

The clear manifestation of intellectual curiosity is to ask good questions, open questions, and profound questions. The art of questioning is to ignite creative thinking or critical thinking and stimulate wide imagination. The science of questioning is about asking the right question at the right time to the right person for the right information to make sound judgment. The essential to questioning stimulates the creative sides of our thought processes to spur fresh ideas and come up with innovative solutions.

Learning agility: When people have the courage to leave inside box thoughts and standards to seek additional resources, updated knowledge, and new experiences, they can step outside that box into unfamiliar territories; they are open to new ideas, experiment with new ways of doing things, learn from instead of condemning or punishing mistakes. In short, they are learning agile and open for innovation.

Developing people’s innovativeness, building business systems’ innovation capability, cultivating innovators raise different "learning" issues that organizations must deal with smoothly. Adaptive learning involves the healthy cycle of unlearning and relearning when the knowledge becomes outdated sooner than you thought of. Generative learning,” enhances our capacity to create.” Collectively, organizations should appreciate their innovators because they can lift the business out of the stagnation and leap the company toward the next level of the growth cycle.

Creative intelligence: Creativity often imposes a higher cognitive ability as you think “harder” via different thought processes such as association, perspective shifting, divergent thinking, convergent thinking etc, to connect wider dots for spurring innovation. The mind with creative intelligence has the ability to think differently- spark fresh ideas or generate new knowledge to solve critical problems in alternative ways. Problem-solving is part of their DNA.

Intelligence is defined as capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding; it is the ability to break any complex thought or problem to the most rudimentary parts whereas they either can be acted on or dismissed. The mind with creative intelligence generates lots of ideas, but it takes logic to recognize, filter, or deal with them, and implement them successfully. Thus, a positive and humble attitude in the creative process to redefine, reinvent, and re-innovate one’s commitment to creativity is key to achieve innovation excellence.

People with creative intelligence can figure out better ways to do things, not for winning a small battle of ego, but to achieve innovation excellence. Choose how to improve the innovation capability based on your talent/innate strengths: Learning, experiencing, training, are all important steps to shape relentless innovators via continuously improving and integrating a set of innovation capabilities into core professional competency.

Posted in: Creativity,Innovation