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While strong skills in one or multiple technologies is very much essential for an innovator, they are just foundational skills to have. Going forward, soft skills such as imagination & creativity; skills in using online technology platforms & marketplaces; solution design & monetization skills will be much sought after in the coming days.
We can broadly classify the desired skills into the following areas:
Pretotyping
The odds are stacked against innovators. Most new products and services fail. Failure is an unavoidable part of the innovation process; but some failures are much harder to take – and survive – than others.
In some cases, the failures can be attributed to poor execution in the way the innovative product or service was built and implemented. But in way too many cases, the innovative product or service was well thought out, planned and built. The team put a lot of time and effort to gave it lots of cool features, they tested and debugged it, polished it and made it look as good as they possibly could – only to find out that they put all this time and effort on the wrong 'it'. They built something that people did not want or need.
Pretotyping is an approach to developing and launching innovation that helps you to determine if you are building the right ‘it’ before you invest a lot of time and effort to build it right. Pretotyping helps you to fail... but fast enough and cheaply enough that you have time and resources to try something different.
A pretotype is a partially mocked-up of the intended product or service that can be built in minutes, hours or days instead of weeks, months or years. The art and science of pretotyping is aimed to help innovators:
Micro-innovators need to be familiar with key technology platforms & tools, open-source products, online marketplaces in order to effectively innovate and take their innovations to the market. Awareness and familiarity of the innovation enablers will help micro-innovators move from idea stage to usage-ready micro-products or services rapidly, often in just a matter of days or weeks.
Design Thinking
Design thinking is a process for creative problem solving.
Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that integrates the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.
The first stage of the 6-stage design thinking process “Empathize” deals with how well we understand the needs, wants, wishes, fears, anxieties, challenges and expectations of end-users who will use our product or service.
Understanding all the 6 stages of design thinking process will help innovators to iteratively come up with a solution that addresses the needs of end-users effectively.
Idea Incubation & Prototyping
Incubation involves ideating about one or more ideas, screening ideas based on some criteria, shortlisting an idea for further consideration, articulating the problem that the idea addresses, elaborating the idea, designing a solution based on the idea, and constructing a prototype or working model of the idea with a view to showcase or prove that the idea works and is of value.
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is the process of actively and skilfully conceptualizing, applying, analysing, synthesizing, and evaluating information to reach an answer or conclusion. Critical thinking helps innovators think before they jump into action. It ensures that what they come out with is not a half-baked solution that meets nobody’s need. While one can learn this skill by failing, learning to critically think upfront helps minimize cost and effort over-runs.
Systems Thinking
Systems’ thinking is a holistic approach to analysis that focuses on the way that a system's constituent parts interrelate and how systems work over time and within the context of larger systems.
Systems thinking allow innovators to identify and understand various aspects of a problem or a solution that need to be considered in order to arrive at an optimal solution that adequately addresses the problem at hand.
Managing an Innovation Project
Managing an innovation project involves the discipline of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing the work of a project team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria at the specified time.
Product Design & Engineering
Product design and engineering consists of designing and creating products meant for mass production and mass consumption. The definition encompasses the functional aspects as well as the qualitative aspects that the product should possess.
Often, innovators confuse a prototype for a product. The difference can be significant. While the objective of a prototype is to demonstrate that the idea or concept works, a product is built for practical use on a daily basis by end-users. As such, factors such as usability, user experience, performance, security, scalability, robustness and reliability of the solution become important.
Monetizing your Innovations
By leveraging online technology platforms and marketplaces, you can readily take your innovations to the market. All you need to know is how to monetize your innovation on various platforms available and how much they pay you. The more your innovation scales and more people start using your innovation, the more money you can make.
Business Modelling
A business model is a plan for how a business will generate revenues and make a profit. It explains what products or services the business plans to manufacture and market, what benefits the products or services offers to its users, and how it plans to do so, including what expenses it will incur.
If you are leveraging an online marketplace, they already have a business model that you can leverage. If not, you can come up with your own and take your innovation to the market.
Business Planning
A business plan is a document that describes a new business, its products or services, how it will earn money, leadership and staffing, financing, operations model, and other details that are essential to both operation and success.
If you plan to setup your own business, then, having a business plan will help you chart out how your business will be setup, how it will be funded, how you plan to grow, etc.
Intense curiosity, observing, questioning, associating, connecting, experimenting, collaborating, communicating, critical thinking and persevering are the key transformative soft skills necessary for innovators.
Beyond all these skills, perhaps Imagination is the greatest skill required of an innovator. Imagination is defined as the creative faculty of the mind to form new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses. Imagination is at the core of innovations, as imagination leads to ideas, and ideas gives birth to creative expression when the innovation manifests in the physical world as a product or service.