Are You an Innovator? 5 Skills of Innovators + 2 Additional

What are the most important skills of innovators? Scientists, business people, managers, and entrepreneurs always want to know what is the perfect person to manage and grow the business.

The business world in which operates your business will require entrepreneurial skills, managerial skills, and innovation skills.

What are the skills that make one person perfect? What are the habits of those perfect persons? How do they think, breathe, and what do they eat? When they are working, how much do they stay at work? How to be the perfect person that will ensure high business growth? All of these questions were asked and analyzed a long time before.

There are too many researches conducted that want to find characteristics of that perfect person. We know that also Frederick Taylor (1856–1915) have conducted experiments to find the person that will accomplish more jobs for a shorter time.

losing and adding skills of innovators

But, this isn’t a simple task to find the perfect person. There are different businesses that were started by different entrepreneurs and that was really successful. Between those entrepreneurs, we cannot find the same characteristics.

Maybe the task is more difficult because don’t exist a perfect person. We all have a deficiency of something. I agree with Ichak Adizes about his theory that there doesn’t exist the perfect manager, perfect leader, perfect innovator, or perfect employee. He talks about the complementary team that will accomplish a perfect job. In such a team, all deficiencies to one person are complemented with the skills of another person.

5 Skills of Innovators

Even I agree about complementary teams, I read one interesting post about Skills of Innovators On the Harvard Business Review Blog as a part of the Creativity at Work Special Package. This post is about the findings of a six-year study surveying 3,000 creative executives and conducting additional 500 individual interviews to find skills that distinguish successful innovators. The 5 skills that were discovered from research are:

  • Associating
  • Questioning
  • Ability to closely observe details
  • Ability to Experimenting
  • Networking

I think that these innovators’ skills really make a big difference between successful managers and entrepreneurs and average managers and entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are people who innovate, and they have a very close relation to innovation. Because of that, these 5 skills are important also for entrepreneurs.

2 Additional skills of innovators

I want to add two more skills that I think are important for successful entrepreneurs:

  1. Ability to recognize the opportunities. Ability to recognize the opportunities and validate business ideas is one important task for every entrepreneur. Their businesses were started with the discovered opportunity. With this skill, they will continually grow their business.
  2. Ability to have more than one solution to the same problem. This skill is something that has a large potential to bring quick improvements for any possible errors from one solution. If one solution doesn’t give the results another will be here to replace the first.

The skills of innovators are something that can increase your business potential energy in large part. Also, they are one of the ten most important basic business elements. Another thing you need to know about the skills is that you can easily lose some of them in the future period of time.