INNOVATION by DESIGN: What It Takes to Keep Your Company on the Cutting Edge

Chapter 10. What It Takes to Be an Innovator

So, what does it take to be an innovator? Do innovators possess any particular personal characteristics that provide an advantage? This chapter focuses on the issues commonly referred to as soft skills, characteristics, and attitudes, which in most situations are just as important as if not more important than discipline knowledge. There is nothing soft about these skills. They determine performance. These soft skills can be more appropriately referred to as integrating skills, or collaborative business skills. They are the skills that allow the implementation of discipline knowledge to achieve an objective. In the final analysis the innovator needs what I refer to as the put-it-all-together competence ...