Pic for representation only: The innovator must understand the business case to pursue an innovation and appropriately pitch it.

Let us now say you want to recruit ‘Innovators'? What would be the discussion between you and your HR partner? It is very difficult to establish which skills you want to have in this innovator because there is no clear ‘list of skills' and at which level of these skills you want your innovator to be at. 

Remember we want to hire innovators since we want innovation. They cannot become innovators just because we want innovation. They should be either formally educated as innovators or be given a focused training on the job for being innovators.

While there is no formal education to train innovators (like we train mechanical or software engineers), most on the job trainings focus on ‘Innovation' as a process and not on ‘Innovators'. This won't help people become better innovators as they can't change much as individuals. Now comes the worst part for the people from whom we expect innovation.

We make the results of their efforts as innovators, a part of their appraisal cycle and obviously reward or penalise for performance or non-performance respectively. This is an unfair method to manage innovators since we are expecting people to do something which they are not trained to do and we are linking their reward and recognition to this. This can lead to frustration for both the employees and the organisation as efforts do not yield results as often and as much as it should do.

Very often the root cause of low business relevant innovation is because of a fundamentally wrong approach of starting with ideas. We need to solve a pain point to expect a higher rate of success because someone will be willing to pay for your innovation.

While solving any problem won't guarantee success, picking the right problem, what we call the ‘valuable problem', is the key to achieve successful innovation. These problems can be in the present or in the future. Problems in the present are more certain and hence less risky while the possible problems in the future are riskier but more rewarding too.

A world class innovator is efficient in finding a valuable problem before, pursuing the process of idea generation. This ensures that when this valuable problem is solved there is real chance of finding customers and hence cranking up the top line. If the innovator pursues ideas first, a valuable problem becomes evasive and hence finding success with the so-called innovation is almost impossible. This explains why starting with ideas is not the best way to pursue innovation.

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