Finding and growing innovators: Keeping ahead of the competition

Innovation is seen by many organizations as the next frontier to be managed in order to gain a competitive advantage and remain sustainable. Innovation management shares much in common with knowledge management, both being recognized as involving a resource, which resides in individuals, can be value-added and transferred via (teams of) people, is difficult to capture, is highly contextual, and continually evolving. We believe that innovation is even harder to define, represent, and transfer due to its intrinsic relationship with creativity and novelty generation. Nevertheless, we seek to determine if patterns of behavior do exist which can be used to predict likely future innovative behavior. Current psychometric tests used to test for innovation or creativity often do little more than identify various personality traits or characteristics which can be used to suggest an individual who might be suitable to fill a recognized gap in the organization. We offer an approach, building on our work along psychological lines with tacit knowledge measurement in the ICT domain that seeks to capture responses to real scenarios experienced by recognized innovators and entrepreneurs. These scenarios and responses are used to evaluate the degree to which the respondent can be considered an innovator so that areas of personal or professional development may be identified.