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I have a found a great arti­cle on the Gallup Man­age­ment Jour­nal writ­ten by Shel­ley Mika. It a great arti­cle that I strongly sug­gest you to read if you are into innovation.

You can read the arti­cle by point­ing your web browser here.

There are four con­di­tions that have to be sat­is­fied to cre­ate innovation.

Find­ing and fos­ter­ing talents

The first inter­est­ing point here is that accord­ing to Jim Clifton, Gallup chair­man and CEO, there are four types of peo­ple that dri­ves innovation:

• inven­tors
• entre­pre­neurs
• extreme indi­vid­ual achievers
• super men­tors

I would, per­son­ally, add one cat­e­gory to this list. The liai­son offi­cer. This guy may be part of team or one of the peo­ple in the four cat­e­gories may act as a liai­son offi­cer. I have seen the every sin­gle guy in the four cat­e­gories speaks a dif­fer­ent lan­guage and you really need some­one that is able to trans­late mes­sages for other peo­ple in the inno­va­tion team. It’s just like build­ing a com­mon ground for all the dif­fer­ent actors on the stage.
Every sin­gle per­son involved in the inno­va­tion process should be a tal­ented per­son and here is why it’s impor­tant to hire tal­ented peo­ple for your orga­ni­za­tion. I agree on this.

After you have these guys on board you need to cre­ate the best envi­ron­ment to let their tal­ent grow, evolve and turn into innovation.

That’s per­fectly true.

I would add a note on that. You should try to find a way to keep these guys on board. This does not only mean to pro­vide them with the best envi­ron­ment but, also, put in place some way to make these guy stay with you in the long term. They have to be happy or, just to make a cita­tion, they have to “Stay hun­gry, stay fool­ish” [Steve Jobs, Apple Inc. CEO, Stan­ford, June 2005, link]
Man­ager mat­tersThis is another key fac­tor. Man­agers have to turn inno­va­tion in action. They have to make things hap­pen. This is why you want man­ager that stand in the tal­ented group of peo​ple​.In my expe­ri­ence I have seen too many often inno­va­tion ideas being dropped because of bad man­agers, lack of ini­tia­tive or support.

I would say that a good, tal­ented man­ager is the per­fect guy to act as a liai­son offi­cer. In the group and towards senior management.

Rela­tion­ship mat­ters too

This is some­thing that man­agers really know very well, prob­a­bly too much in some occasion.

The risk is that rela­tion­ship may turn up in pol­i­tics and that is a risk that you should not want to take if you are sup­posed to lead an inno­va­tion team.

Rela­tion­ship may be inter­preted as inter­nal or exter­nal. Every­body involved in inno­va­tion knows very well that at the end of chain there is some kind of cus­tomer, what­ever your field in inno­va­tion is. As I have writ­ten in other posts on this blog cus­tomer may be a great source of inno­va­tion. I would add cus­tomers as the fifth cat­e­gory of peo­ple that dri­ves innovation.

In this par­tic­u­lar case I am using the word cus­tomer in its wider sig­nif­i­cance. Every­body, from the guy who buys your prod­uct or ser­vice, the dean of your uni­ver­sity, or sim­ply another depart­ment may be your cus­tomer.
Treat­ing rela­tion­ship as a value can really boost the inno­va­tion process and may, some­times, pro­vide you with real­ity checks that are really valuable.

Keep­ing the right leaders

This is crit­i­cal but, as I wrote above, it is crit­i­cal to keep all the tal­ented peo­ple in the team. Prob­a­bly the leader may have the biggest chance to give direc­tions to the team he man­ages and this is why you may want to keep him on board.

Why do I blog this? Well, this is all what inno­va­tion is about.

The photo is from net­srot Flickr photostream.

Related posts:

1. Inno­va­tion is everywhere
2. Sources of uncon­ven­tional innovation
3. The quest for Web innovation
4. Junior or Senior? Ded­i­cated to…
5. Inno­va­tion Santa