"The Five Personalities of Innovators: Which One Are You?"

Whenever I try to conjure up what innovation looks like, the same slideshow of images clicks across my mind: that photo of Einstein with his tongue sticking out, Edison with his light bulb, Steve Jobs onstage in his black turtleneck, introducing the latest iThing. Unoriginal and overdone, to be sure. And not all that accurate.

Because it’s not just about that romantic “ah ha!” moment in front of a chalkboard or a cocktail napkin, it’s about the nitty-gritty work that comes after the idea:  getting it accepted and implemented. Who are these faces? And, most importantly, as I’m sure you’re all asking yourselves: where do I fit in?

Forbes Insights’ recent study, “Nurturing Europe’s Spirit of Enterprise: How Entrepreneurial Executives Mobilize Organizations to Innovate,” isolates and identifies five major personalities crucial to fostering a healthy atmosphere of innovation within an organization. Some are more entrepreneurial, and some more process-oriented – but all play a critical role in the process. To wit: thinkers need doers to get things done, and idealists need number crunchers to tether them to reality.

Though it may seem stymieing at times, in any healthy working environment, a tension between the risk-takers and the risk-averse must exist; otherwise, an organization tilts too far to one extreme or the other and either careens all over the place or moves nowhere at all. An effective and productive culture of innovation is like a good minestrone soup: it needs to have the right mix and balance of all the ingredients, otherwise it’s completely unsuccessful, unbalanced — and downright mushy.

The Forbes Insights study surveyed more than 1,200 executives in Europe across a range of topics and themes. Using a series of questions about their attitudes, beliefs, priorities and behaviors, coupled with a look at the external forces that can either foster – or desiccate – an innovative environment, a picture emerged of five key personality types the play a role in the innovation cycle.

This last piece – the corporate environment – is a stealth factor that can make or break the potential even the most innovative individual. Look at it this way: a blue whale is the largest animal known ever to have existed, but if you tried to put it in a freshwater lake, it wouldn’t survive. Well, that and it would displace a lot of water. My point? Even the largest and mightiest of creatures can’t thrive in an environment that doesn’t nurture them.

The themes surveyed in the study are universal; despite the focus on European executives, these personalities are applicable across oceans and cultures. The full study, available here, provides further breakdown of where these personality types congregate by industry, company size and job function.

I’ll leave it to you to decide which one fits you best . You may even see a little of yourself in more than one group.  But remember, none of these are bad. All play crucial roles in developing an idea, pushing it up the corporate channels, developing a strategy and overseeing execution and implementation. These are all pieces of a puzzle, arteries leading to the beating heart of corporate innovation. Wow – can I make that sound any more dramatic?

The Five Personality Types of Innovation: a breakdown

Movers and Shakers. With a strong personal drive, these are leaders. Targets and rewards motivate them strongly, but a major incentive for this group is the idea of creating a legacy and wielding influence over others. These are the ones who like being in the front, driving projects forward (and maybe promoting themselves in the process), but at the end of the day, they provide the push to get things done. On the flip side, they can be a bit arrogant, and impatient with teamwork.  Movers and Shakers tend to cluster in risk and corporate strategy, in the private equity and media industries, at mid-size companies; though they comprise 22% of total executives, at companies with revenues of $25 million to $1 billion, Movers and Shakers can encompass up to one-third of the executive suite.

Experimenters. Persistent and open to all new things, experimenters are perhaps the perfect combination for bringing a new idea through the various phases of development and execution. “Where there is a will, there is a way,” is perhaps the best way to describe them. They’re perfectionists and tend to be workaholics, most likely because it takes an incredible amount of dedication, time and hard work to push through an idea or initiative that hasn’t yet caught on. They take deep pride in their achievements, but they also enjoy sharing their expertise with others; they’re that intense colleague who feels passionately about what they do and makes everyone else feel guilty for daydreaming during the meeting about what they plan on making for dinner that night. Because they’re so persistent, even in the face of sometimes considerable pushback, they’re crucial to the innovation cycle. They tend to be risk-takers, and comprise about 16% of executives – and are most likely to be found in mid-size firms of $100 million to $1 billion (20%). Surprisingly, they’re least likely to be CEOs or COOs – just 14% and 15%, respectively, are Experimenters.

"Five Ways to Make Corporate Space More Creative"

Winston Churchill famously said, "We shape our buildings; thereafter, they shape us." The places we work and the ways we think are inextricably linked: a few changes to one inform the other. It's possible to shape an environment to encourage creativity and collaboration. And changes to a workplace need not be complicated: simple changes are often the most effective, if only because they will actually be implemented. If your office space is dampening creativity and your company's facilities department isn't a resource, there is hope. Here are five tactics you can use to improve a less-than-ideal work environment.

1. Begin with your own mindset. Reframe what you can't do into what you can do.

This is a cunning approach to making the most impact with the fewest resources: it is guerrilla warfare. You need to take small immediate steps toward change, instead of retreating from seemingly insurmountable infrastructure.

2. Focus on a few basic variables.

Posture, orientation (of people relative to each other), and ambience (the intangibles of a room, like lighting) are easy to tweak in any environment. For example, we've noticed time and time again that an upright posture encourages people to stay alert and engaged in problem solving, while a comfortable, "lean-back" posture often turns people into passive critics. Critique is important at times, but it can get in the way of idea generation. At the d.school we use tall stools gathered in small circles for many work sessions. The stools aren't selected for comfort; they're tall and upright to keep students alert and prompt them to get up and move about.

Ambience has huge impact while often receiving little attention, or credit. Be aware of how a room feels, and act like a good host. Simply adding multiple sources of warm light (e.g. floor lamps) and opening some windows can change the tone of a meeting space — and of the meeting itself — from institutional and routine to refreshing and special. If your culture can bear it, add in a little music as people enter to perk people up.

3. Start small, take action, and create momentum.

Action builds momentum. If you find yourself or your team working as undercover agents for change, ask: What are things that we can do and try that no one will notice at first? Start meeting in a common area and see if you can build a mini-movement to transform the behaviors of those around you. Take over an unused room and make it a persistent, shared project space. See who will join your team.

Very small steps are easy, and they can help you make your case for bigger changes. Small-scale, intentional explorations can also inform larger decisions, in part by illuminating the unique attributes of your particular culture. The Stanford University d.school, for example, prototyped three different buildings — beginning with a small trailer — before designing its current home. Prototyping toward significant cultural changes and capital expenses is a repeatable approach that not only minimizes risk, but also illuminates unique opportunities for designing your culture.

4. Design for your culture — not another group of people in another place.

Designing for your particular culture is important — really important. While many concepts are one-size-fits-all, the implementations are not. Implementation is the difference between selecting the ideal bike to pedal through Amsterdam versus San Francisco: both are beautiful cities for biking, but better stick with a single-speed for the Dutch flats and multiple gears for the Bay City hills. Paying attention to your particular details will pay off.

5. Build.

The only sure way to create change is to actually create it. As soon as you build something it becomes a magnet for activity. Building may seem like a daunting task, but we've repeatedly seen that the physical act of making things sets off a spark that attracts like-minded people and becomes a beacon for what's possible.

Early efforts at building can have a lasting impact: one of the first items built at the d.school is the Z-Rack. It is simply a suped-up garment rack rigged with a sandwich of showerboard — a construction material that works great as a dry erase surface. That first design continues to provide endless, inexpensive whiteboard space. (There are instructions for making one here.)

The bottom line: take small actions. Be opportunistic, make easy changes, and invite others to work with you.