MANILA – Innovation is quite a hot topic right now, and as they all say, it’s ‘innovate or die’. While you may not consider yourself an innovative person, the good news is you can learn to be innovative by cultivating a few characteristics.
AN OPPORTUNISTIC MINDSET
Innovation occurs when there’s a gap in the market, but some people are better at spotting opportunities than others. You can cultivate this mindset by trying to keep an idea diary, where you jot down any ideas that come to mind. You can also spot opportunities by generally being curious and learning about how things work. This will maximize your chances of finding the loopholes in the way things currently operate.
PROACTIVITY
Nothing happens when you don’t act upon something. When you finally spot an opportunity, a proactive spirit will enable you to explore and make something out of the best opportunities that you find. You can start being proactive with something small. Learn how to anticipate even the simplest of problems and the smallest events to be able to improve the situation. Don’t allow yourself to become complacent. A little exercise on proactivity could be to notice what is happening, think about your options and then act on the situation.
PERSISTENCE AND RESILIENCE
It’s very rare for an idea to work perfectly the first time around. Therefore, persistence and resilience are very important characteristics to have when doing something innovative. Since you’re doing something that has never been done before, you might get a lot of resistance from various people. To push through with what you have in mind, you have to be persistent enough to overcome the barriers and break down the resistance. You should also be resilient to criticism and people who are negative to change. Try to develop persistence by setting some goals and doing whatever it takes to achieve it. Start small, then gradually set bigger goals.
SOCIABILITY
Innovation is the result of good teamwork. Although, the founder of the idea or innovation gets all the glory in the press, there’s usually a team behind that person. It is therefore beneficial to have good social skills to not only work within a team, but also to sell the idea or strategy to other people and keep the team focussed on the mission at hand. If you’re not a sociable person, you might want to join a club, team or do some volunteering to get more practice on how to work in a team and learn to love interacting with people.
So there you go, if you want to be innovative, you can increase your chances of success by developing an opportunistic mindset, proactivity, persistence and resilience as well as sociability.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jamie Tolentino works as a digital marketer at a global asset management firm. She writes for TNW (The Next Web) and blogs on the Huffington Post UK. | ILLUSTRATION BY: Dempson Mayuga
This article was first published in the September-October 2015 issue of adobo magazine.
