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

As an example, if I come up with an ‘idea' it is like developing a medicine without knowing the sickness it should cure. On the other hand, knowing the problem will help me develop a cure for the same effectively. Thus, encouraging people to come up with ideas is a very unscientific method to achieve innovation. This means we are basically approaching our innovation in an ad-hoc, trial-and-error method.

A world class innovator can make a difference and let us understand the role of the ‘Innovator' in this. A typical innovation journey has three phases - Ideation, Implementation and Value Realisation phases. A successful innovator should play one role in each of these phases - Artist, Scientist and Industrialist.

As an Artist, the innovator explores all the possible problems and possible solutions. The important aspect of this phase is to identify all possible opportunities and identify the most valuable ones amongst them. As a scientist, the innovator ensures that data is used to convert idea to reality, explore the existing solutions and select possible solutions using a proof of concept. As an Industrialist, the innovator must understand the business case to pursue an innovation and appropriately pitch it.

If an innovator can successfully don these three roles he can be assured of great deal of success. These skills are domain agnostic and can be used effectively in any domain. This will ensure a scientific and more certain way of being a world class innovator. Let us present a case study here. A set of 80 young engineers of a technical competence center could come up with 190 business relevant ideas within a couple of weeks spending few hours per week using this process.

Innovation versus innovator is like painting versus the painter. A painter can create a great painting and an innovator can create a great innovation. To be a world class innovator there are certain skills to develop to be used during the journey of this innovation. Skills are those that we are not born with but we can learn, like we were not born with writing skill but we learnt it.

Organisations can map the innovation journey to the skills they need from their innovators. This will make the whole process more scientific and more importantly repeatable.

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