Creating Value from Whatever Life Throws Your Way
Innovativeness Defined
Research-based strategies, insights and inspiration to create value and drive positive change, in the world and in yourself.
What is innovativeness anyway?
Of all the capabilities you may aspire to have, innovativeness may be the most useful. Especially when you’re facing new challenges. I’ve already made repeated references to innovativeness. You probably have an intuitive sense of what that is, but it’s time I explained exactly what I mean.
Questions this article explores
What is innovativeness?
Why is innovativeness a critical human capability?
Is innovativeness the same as creativity?
Can someone be too creative to be innovative?
Can people change how innovative they are?
Innovation and Innovativeness Explained
As the term suggests, innovativeness is closely related to innovation. However, Innovation, like mindset, seems to have almost as many definitions as there are people talking about it. (And that’s a lot.) Some of those definitions are quite specific. They often have a strong business focus and require that a new product gain traction in the marketplace and generate profits. The product could be anything from a new software program to new flavors of snack chips.
I prefer to think of innovation more broadly, as simply valuable novelty. A definition expansive enough to capture innovation in all its forms. To count as an innovation, something must first be new in some way. Maybe new to the world, or at least new in some context. There are many examples of someone adopting some application from another business or discipline. Henry Ford got the idea for the manufacturing assembly line, by visiting a meat packing plant and observing its disassembly line.
The other requirement is that it must provide value. That value can come in many forms. It might be the profits a business generates, benefits for the customer, some discovery by a scientist, or a novel design by an engineer. Perhaps it’s some social change or personal breakthrough. In nature, it’s an adaptation that increases an organism’s capabilities and helps it survive.
Innovativeness is the ability to produce valuable novelty—to create new value. And it’s not just a human competency. It can be a business capability, an aspect of science, or something that defines natural or social systems. Nature is incredibly innovative and has been since long before people existed. Of course societies evolve as well. For you, it’s ability to overcome some challenge, solve problems, or reach some goal.
Innovativeness in people is my primary focus. Nature doesn’t need my help, and there are plenty of experts on business innovation. But there’s been less focus on innovativeness as a universal human capability.
Innovativeness vs. Creativity
Many have argued that for humans, the needed skill is creativity, and innovation is the application of that creativity. Creativity is certainly important, but there’s more that’s required. Including a willingness to experiment and take risks. The ability to make astute observations, gain insight, and revise your own thinking. These are things creative people may do, but that are not necessarily part of what we define as creativity per se.
Some folks are a little too creative to be effective innovators. This happens when being imaginative and divergent becomes their primary goal, unconnected to realities in the larger environment. I sometimes get pushback from business leaders who resist having their people become too innovative, for fear that they won’t align with business objectives. They’ve seen highly creative people become unmanageable and unproductive, and feel a need to “reign them in.” But true innovativeness accounts for the environment—including business realities. It continually adjusts to those realities in ways that are brutally pragmatic, not just creative.
Following the Innovation Cycle
As I’ve explained in previous articles, innovation follows the innovation cycle, and so does Innovativeness. It’s a mindset that embraces the innovation cycle. It’s all the things that need to come together to produce innovation. The whole constellation of attributes and activities that collectively produce valuable novelty. That includes making astute observations; being open to discovering new insights; creating new possibilities; and exploring those possibilities to identify solutions and create value. (In case you haven’t noticed, developing innovativeness is the core mission of this Substack and of my work.)
Innovativeness is having real impact on the environment you’re in, the larger world around you. It’s being open to continually updating your understanding of that world. And it’s being willing to apply those same strategies to yourself, to drive personal change, adaptation and growth. It’s having an innovator mindset.
I’ve found that for a few, this is their natural state. An innovator mindset is how they navigate their lives. For another small percentage, it’s just the opposite. They tend to resist change, shoot down new possibilities, and lock down on their prior assumptions and beliefs—a status quo mindset. They process whatever comes at them in ways that will reinforce the beliefs they already have. Most of us apply some combination of the two, yet favoring one or the other of those extremes.
No matter where you are along that spectrum, you can change. That’s the beauty of mindset. Developing your innovativeness is the goal I suggest you pursue. It’s also the strategy you use to pursue that goal. It makes your mindset malleable rather than frozen in place.
What’s your Innovativeness Index?
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A Killer App?
In the early days of personal computers, before the technology was widely adopted, various software programs were developed that could do unprecedented things. They were so useful that they motivated people to buy computers to be able to use the software. Early versions of spreadsheets and word processors became known as “killer applications” or “killer apps” because they were so popular that they drove the sales of the computers needed to run them. It’s been suggested that email was the killer app that attracted people onto the early internet. These applications provided a compelling why and how for adopting those new technologies. They made something that seemed a little esoteric, much more useful and compelling, by providing dramatic new capabilities.
When it comes to gaining new capabilities in how you understand and use the world around you to make your life better, your innovativeness has the same benefit. It makes everything more useful and compelling. It’s how the universe orders itself and how we can best order our lives.
An innovator mindset—innovativeness—just might be the universe’s killer app!
In my next article, I’ll discuss a research-based approach to building and strengthening your innovativeness—to create an innovator mindset.
How are you creating value for yourself and others? Where in your life would you like to create more value?
Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.
—Albert Einstein (paraphrased)
Hi, I’m Dennis Stauffer. I’m an internationally recognized expert on the mindset of world class innovators. I’ve studied innovativeness in entrepreneurs in cooperation with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and developed innovativeness in students under a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation. I’m a neurodivergent Emmy Award-winning journalist, author, speaker, independent researcher, social entrepreneur, and innovation practitioner. In other words, I’m still deciding what I want to be when I grow up.
My focus here is on developing the capabilities we all need, to respond to the dramatic changes coming at us—and create value—in the world and in our lives. Thanks for being here. Let’s go make the world better.
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