Hiring: 5 Tips to Find True Innovators

It's not just a matter of finding creative dreamers; you need people who can turn ideas into money. Here's what to look for.

Flickr/OnInnovation

Walking through Times Square recently, I came upon a hot dog vendor promising something astounding. On the side of his cart hung a giant sign advertising "Hot dogs with an innovative new design!!!!" 

Since I work in innovation--and am a huge fan of all things carnivorous--I had to check out this miracle of modern gastronomy. 

Imagine my surprise when I discovered the "innovative new design" consisted of three elements: a bun, a cylindrical serving of meat (i.e, a hot dog) and Heinz ketchup. 

Convinced the subtle nuance of his artistry must have blown right by me, I quizzed the chef about the innovative nature of the design (I let the "new" part slide because I assumed it was just marketing). 

He stopped working, looked me right in the eyes, and absolutely beamed when he revealed his mysterious secret: His hot dogs came with the ketchup so you didn't have to ask for it. 

And right at that moment, I realized just how troubling the innovation craze has become. The idea of innovation is popping up everywhere. On everything. And as this beef-peddling savant demonstrated so eloquently, it can mean virtually anything. 

For a company whose entire business pivots on innovation, this poses two problems. First, we run the risk of being lumped together with a wide range of "innovation firms" selling the strategic equivalent of snake oil for clients desperately in need of something new. 

And second, we get bombarded with résumés all claiming to have rich innovation experience. In fact, in the last year alone, we received 4,000 resumes for just 10 positions. While some applicants clearly had experience creating products, businesses, and services that delivered groundbreaking utility, others bore a striking resemblance to the Ferran Adrià of dirty-water dogs I met on 47^th street. 

Sifting though applicants over the past five years has helped us figure out how to spot a genius within the genus. Hopefully, the lessons we've learned will be useful for other firms looking to hire true innovators.   

The Keys to Hiring Effective Innovators 

Our hiring philosophy is guided by two truths about the pursuit of growth through innovation and the market gap that lies between them. 

The first is that there is no shareholder value in a brilliant growth strategy without the creative synthesis of tangible, compelling offerings to commercialize it.

The second is the converse--that creative pipe-dreaming disconnected from commercial realities isn't worth much more than an inspiring afternoon. 

We are on a mission to bridge this gap by bringing together historically isolated capabilities: potent commercial strategy and inspiring creativity. Or, in our parlance, the Money and the Magic. 

Central to our ambition is being able to consistently attract a unique group of people who are walking embodiments of this balance. To find them, we look for people who possess five key characteristics: 

1. Intellectually Restless:

Great innovators get a thrill out of defining a bold vision and then wrestling with the data, insights, barriers, and opportunities to unlock what needs to be true to get there.

2. Inspiring Rather Than Convincing:

Applicants who come from traditional consulting are often proficient at framing opportunities, yet unaccustomed to creating outcomes. We want people who can do both. Those who recognize that innovation, by its very nature, is at odds with certainty. Breakthroughs can't be proven. They need to be envisioned and driven.

3. Proven Ability to Drive Innovation:

There's a big difference between recognizing a great innovation and understanding how to create a great innovation. Unlike financial markets, past performance in innovation is, more often than not, an indicator of future performance.

4. Have Scaled a Peak:

We look for greatness in some aspect of an applicant's life: successful entrepreneur, published writer, Ivy League graduate, Division I athlete, etc. The metric of success is less important than the success itself. We want people who are comfortable defining a high-order goal and then doing what it takes to accomplish it.

5. Willing to Commit to Something Bigger Than Themselves:

 This is important on two levels. At a firm level, we want people who are excited by the belief that we're on a mission to create a fundamentally new type of business. On a personal level, we want talent who believes in something that doesn't exist today. This type of belief is the core of innovation. Therefore, we look for candidates who've already demonstrated their commitment to a higher-order ambition. It can be sports, religion, a philosophy, or a charity. The object of devotion is much less important than the proven willingness to invest passionately with a group of people to realize a dream. 

It's tough to find people who possess all five characteristics. But when you do, you've found something special. And although it's a big call, I would argue... even more special than pre-loaded ketchup. 

Pete Maulik is Chief Strategy Officer at Fahrenheit 212, an innovation consultancy engaged to deliver top-line growth. @Fahrenheit212

via inc.com

 

Yep! This Clown Will Make You Pregnant

Tel Aviv native Nimrod Eisenberg had no intention of following in his parents’ footsteps and becoming a doctor. Although his childhood was spent mostly in hospitals—his mother is a midwife and his father a physician—he had career ambitions outside the medical field. So when he was just seventeen years old, he says, “I ran away and joined the circus.”

Not literally, but he did spend several years performing as a clown and juggler at circuses around Israel, much to his family’s consternation. And he eventually moved to Paris to study the clowning arts at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, a renown theater school. (He never wanted to be a clown in the traditional Western tradition. “In America, your clowns are either happy hobos or sad hobos.” His clowning personality, he says, is more like Charlie Chaplin.) Eisenberg soon found his way back to Israel, where he enrolled in the University of Haifa and graduated with a bachelor’s degree… in medical clowning.

“Yes, that’s a real thing,” Eisenberg laughs. “A lot of people think I’m kidding, but I’m a university accredited medical clown.”

In 2003, he joined Dream Doctors, an Israel-based organization that brings medical clowns to clinics and hospitals. It isn’t an unorthodox option that patients have to specifically request. In Israel, medical clowns are available to anybody who wants them. “We’re just another service provided by the hospital,” Eisenberg says. “We’re as integral to the medical staff as anybody.” He works alongside the doctors and nurses as a collaborative part of a patient’s treatment. “We try to be there for every procedure,” he says. “We’re there when they draw blood or change a bandage or do an x-ray.”

He has arguably the toughest job in medicine. Making somebody laugh while they’re stuck in the unhappiest place on earth is, unsurprisingly, often an uphill battle. “A hospital can be pretty grim and depressing, even for positive people,” Eisenberg says. “But if I can change their perspective, get them to reconnect with their joy, it can do wonders.” Clowns can be so effective in stress reduction that, in some minor surgeries, Eisenberg says, “a clown replaces general anesthesia.”

It’s a healing philosophy that’s also at the core of a new experimental treatment being pioneered by Eisenberg and Dream Doctors: Clown-assisted in vitro fertilization. “I only visit the patient after the in vitro procedure,” Eisenberg clarifies. The theory is, much like laughter contributes to the healing of sick people by reducing their stress, a little levity could have the same effect on fertility patients. There’s even research to back it up. In a study conducted by Dr. Shevach Friedler of the Assaf Harofeh Medical Centre in Israel, 219 women undergoing IVF were visited by clowns for 15 minutes after embryo implantation. 36 percent of them became pregnant.

“There’s a lot of unspoken tension and stress in a fertility ward,” Eisenberg says. “Once you start playing with that tension and acknowledging it and joking over it, it’s able to burst out and offer some relief.” One of his more successful bits with fertility patients involves a tea kettle with a red nose covering the spout. “I hold it like it’s a baby that’s crying,” he explains. “It’s my clown baby. I apologize for it, and I try rocking it to sleep and singing it songs, anything to make it stop crying.” Perhaps not a comedy routine that would amuse most audiences, but for a patient just coming out of IVF surgery, it addresses the elephant in the room. A tea kettle baby is the manifestation of all their hopes and anxieties.

“It’s a delicate balance,” he says. “You have to play on their fears without mocking them. You take those things that sit in the stomach and bring them to the surface so we can look at them and laugh about them.”

Fertility clowns have become more commonplace in Israel, but the rest of the world is still reluctant. Earlier this month, Eisenberg and fellow Dream Doctors clown Jérôme Arous toured hospitals in Canada, giving conferences and hosting workshops for fertility patients and curious doctors in Quebec City, Montreal, Chicoutimi and Halifax. They were met, Eisenberg remembers, with cautious enthusiasm. “I am not convinced,” Dr. Hananel Holzer of Montreal’s McGill Reproductive Centre told a local radio station about fertility clowns. “Not yet.”

Eisenberg is confident that the global medical community will catch on eventually. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that even his own family didn’t take him seriously. He was the black sheep who went into clowning instead of medicine. But he ended up in the family business anyway. He even spent a few years in residence at Hadassah Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, where he worked alongside his brother, an orthopedist.

“It was pretty easy to tell us apart,” Eisenberg says. “One of us dressed strange and talked funny, and the other was a medical clown.”

via businessweek.com