Most people hear the word innovation and immediately check out. They believe that as someone who works in finance, HR or legal it is not their job. Since they don’t work on cool new products or services, why bother?
Such an attitude is a mistake. Innovation skills are not just for founders, product managers or R&D teams. These skills are essential for every role as a way to navigate change and solve problems and influence others.
Not Just For The Cool Kids
There is a myth that innovation is reserved for a select few – the innovation people. These are typically cool creatives that run design thinking workshops, agile sprints and innovation labs. In reality, innovation is happening all the time in our companies in ways that we don’t recognize or celebrate.
Innovation skills are basically the ability to design and test business ideas. These skills can be applied to:
- Spotting new opportunities everyday at work
- Improving our processes to produce better results
- Refreshing our products to better address customer needs
- Crafting marketing campaigns that resonate with customers
- Refining our sales process to generate more lead and close more deals
The Essential Skills To Learn
There are four essential innovation skills that everyone should learn. These skills apply to every part of a business, regardless of the challenge being addressed:
- Problem Framing: Learning the discipline of not jumping to a solution before understanding the problem. The essential skill here is to know how to frame people’s jobs to be done, pains and gains.
- Designing Solutions: Learning the discipline of not falling in love with our first ideas. The essential skill here is to know how to push the boundaries of our ideas, while making sure they address people’s jobs, pains and gains.
- Testing Assumptions: Learning the discipline of testing ideas before implementing them. The essential skill here is to know how to generate hypotheses, prioritize them and choose the right experiment to run.
- Evolving Ideas: Learning to accept that you won’t always get it right the first time. The essential skill here is knowing how to use failure as learning that makes our ideas better.
With the world constantly changing around us, we need to be able to evolve in our roles. The impact of AI on everyday work is now undeniable. The most valuable employees will be the ones that can rethink their assumptions and adapt to change.
In the end, these are not just innovation skills, these are career skills!