When examining innovation processes, it is clear that not only the phases of innovation, types of innovation and service providers influence the outcomes. The personality traits of the innovators are equally decisive for the success or failure of the innovation process. A new report from the Agrispin Scientific Team takes a closer look at the issue of personality.
Personality Traits of Innovators
Certain personality characteristics may be highlighted as important for the innovator: curiosity, the propensity for exploration and openness, the ability to set clear targets, to plan, take initiatives and show leadership and proceed step-by-step. Also, the ability to take risks and above all a passionate willingness to defend and implement the innovative idea are present in almost all innovations initiated by individuals.
Gregariousness, assertiveness, cooperativeness, alertness for digging out solutions, feeling responsible for community, including sociocultural, economic and environmental aspects, emotional stability as well as trust were also identified.
Curiosity Triggers Innovation
In the case of ASYST (Greece), for example, the innovation process was triggered by the question “What kind of plant is stevia?”, which George Koulossoussas, a crop farmer in Karditsa, who had recently heard about stevia, asked his friend – a pensioner and former director in a tobacco company.
His curiosity turned into a clear interest and, after the creation of a warm network of stakeholders, the decision to explore the opportunity of replacing traditional but no longer profitable plantations with stevia was put into practice.
Openness Is Key
Rens Kuijten, a feed advisor in the Netherlands, on the other hand, had already done a lot of research at a professional level, presenting the same exploratory attitude, before traveling in Peru to expand his knowledge on quinoa. He was convinced that this plant could make a difference in the dairy sector by replacing corn and soy as animal fodder. However, in Peru he explored quinoa’s role in the local communities’ diet and decided to introduce it in the Netherlands as an alternative to animal protein in the human diet. His openness to new experiences allowed him to reorient himself and change his initial idea, simultaneously exhibiting alertness to new opportunities and flexibility to adapt his plans according to the latest developments.
The Will to Succeed
Moreover, a crucial personality trait of innovators is their decisiveness and passion to succeed, which seems to enable them to take risks.
There are examples, the Sustainable Supply Chain Pork (KDV in The Netherlands) is one of them, in which innovators do not regret the routes they followed during the innovation process, even though they often had to deal with great disappointments or failures.
But what gives individual innovators the strength to deal with failures and uncertainty? For Hans Verhoeven in the above-mentioned example, it was the trust of and friendship with his associate in business that made him recover from bankruptcy.
In the case of Dutch Quinoa, Rens Kuijten got energy from his family to take the decision to abandon his job and chase his dream. The support from family and close friends and associates seems to be a key factor for the innovators’ emotional stability, which again is connected to their ability to build stable relationships.
Building Stable Relationships
The ability to build stable relationships is of particular significance in innovators’ interplay with advisors and support service providers because it enables the development of trust between them and establishes an open communication channel, which makes their expression of needs possible and the searching for solutions meaningful.
Therefore, emotional stability and the ability to build relationships of trust are basic personality traits that are prerequisites for good cooperation among actors in the course of innovation processes. The cases of ASYST and the Sustainable Supply Chain Pork (KDV) present – among others – good examples of such qualities.
Read the new report from the Scientific Team.
Read more reports from AgriSpin.
If the story provided in this article is of interest, you may also find the work done by David Hall [http://www.davidhalluk.com/dhentre.htm] sometime ago, which considered the traits of entrepreneurs, and ways to foster their development of interest too. .