10 faces of innovation

 The author of the book 10 faces of innovation is Tom Kelley. He is the co-founder of an innovation company called IDEO. These guys are hired as consultants to generate ideas at their client companies, so they know a trick or two about innovation. He says for innovation to occur in a company, the team formed should contain people who exhibit 10 different characteristics. It does not mean that there should be 10 people in the team.Each person in the team is expected to exhibit more than one characteristic. The 10 characteristics which he calls as faces are –

 1) Anthropologist – An anthropologist is a person who has a keen eye on the problems faced by people. These people are the ones who maintain bug lists and fix lists. They are extremely good at finding solutions to problems.So, basically, these guys are the ones who come up with new ideas.

2) Experimenter – He enjoys looking at possible scenarios of a problem and creates initial analysis of whether an idea is tangible. Usually this guy is immersed in creating some POCs.

3) Cross Pollinator – He has the ability to connect two seemingly unrelated items. Cross pollinator has an enormous appetite for learning new things. He is the person who connects a bubble gum with a leaky water pipe and comes up with an idea of M-seal product.

4) Hurdler – He is a quiet optimist who knows how to side-step organizational issues to keep moving the idea forward. A hurdler is a tireless problem(non-technical) solver whose key asset is perseverance

5) Collaborator – Helps in solving cross-functional problems. If an idea involves contributions from multiple teams, a collaborator is a must. A collaborator coaxes people from different disciplines to share the ideas and make things work. This role can be played most effectively by managers and bosses in general.

 6) Director – Has the big picture in mind and “directs” the team in a certain direction. A director is responsible for creating a team that works on any innovation. 

 7) Experience Architect – Is responsible for creating the product in such a way that it delights the user every time he uses it. A good example is how you felt when you operated iPod or iPhone for the first time. It is an experience no one will forget. Clearly,Apple have good experience architects.

 8) Set designer – He is supposed to set up a work environment for the team to work on. I really do not think it is applicable in most companies. But the role of the set designer is to ensure that the team is sitting close to each other and that they have enough privacy yet is easy to collaborate with others.

9) Care giver – Every idea goes through highs and lows. The care giver has the rare ability to motivate people through the lows. The caregiver cares a lot about the idea and nurses the idea back to highs. Caregiver is similar to a nurse when the idea is hospitalised.

10) Story Teller – A story-teller is passionate about the idea.He has good communication skills and is able to convince people to invest in the idea. it is like a script writer trying to explain the story he has written to the director and producer. The script writer explains the story in such a way that the director will say, yes, I will make the movie!!

However, if you want to create a team that contains all the faces, how do you create it? How do you know which ones are story tellers and which ones are anthropologists? For this, one of my colleagues( Judith Mills for those of you in CDC Software) proposed a game. In this game everyone is given the 10 faces and each person is supposed to select the 3 faces they believe they exhibit. Then they need to write down these faces in 3 separate sheets of paper. The organiser of this game then collects all the sheets from all the people, mixes them up and returns 3 sheets of paper per person.

Now, the participants each have to look at the faces they received and try to find the person who they believe exhibits the innovation face. They then give this sheet to that person. The trick here is that the other person has to take the sheet that other person has offered. At the end of 5 or 10 minutes some people will end up with lots of anthropologist while some others end up with lots of script writer etc.

I found the game very interesting  to find out if others perceive you as you imagined yourself to be. i.e is your strength really your strength? Do others feel you are strong at something which you never thought?

How does your company create teams to do special projects? Please do comment.