Curiosity!

Picture a baby reaching out to the colourful mobile bobbing above its crib. Or a six-month old crawling around the living room, picking up toys, the waste paper basket or the family cat; feeling them, shaking them, sucking them.

Or recall the pre-schooler who tests her parents’ patience by asking “why?” more than a hundred times a day.

Curiosity is a drive to explore your environment. In children, it’s a powerful urge, but research has shown that that urge to explore diminishes over time.

Curiosity is an important mindstate for innovation. So the less curiosity we have, the harder it will be to innovate.

We need more creative ideas! Yes that sometimes how it seems. New ideas for new products or process improvements or cost savings.

Think again. Do you need more creative ideas or do you need to hear the ones you’re given?

What are the important personal qualities and character traits that an innovation manager should have?

The list is potentially a long one - future orientation, interest in novelty, leadership, resilience and so on. However, if I were pushed to determine the single most important quality, I would say open-mindedness.

This year’s winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics made their breakthrough discovery of super thin flakes of carbon while ‘mucking about’ in their lab. This continues a long list of discoveries, insights and inventions from over the years that have been attributed to ‘organisational slack’, or employees having the time and space to pursue their own areas of interest creatively. Have you got enough ‘slack’ in your organisation to innovate? Or is it something else that’s stopping you from innovating?