Innovator: Novelty Is the Engine

The innovator style’s engine is novelty: it gets more excited imagining different ways of doing things than perfecting what already exists.

Important note: this article describes a personality trait around creativity and novelty, not financial or business advice. It doesn’t replace a qualified advisor’s judgment on any real money or business decision.

“Innovator” is the label our entrepreneurial style quiz gives people who recognize themselves in statements like “Conventional solutions bore me when I sense there’s a better one” or “I tend to question why things are done a certain way.” Three lines of research help make sense of it.

Innovativeness as its own dimension

Research on entrepreneurial orientation, which starts with Danny Miller (1983) and which Jeffrey Covin and Dennis Slevin (1989) turned into a scale, describes innovativeness as a dimension independent of proactiveness or risk-taking. That scale measures companies, not people, but the distinction still holds: you can be very innovative without being especially bold, or the reverse.

The innovator style stands out precisely there. What drives it isn’t so much executing fast or taking on risk as a rule, but creative dissatisfaction with what already exists and the search for a different way of doing it.

Adaptors and innovators: Kirton’s theory

British psychologist Michael Kirton (1976) proposed that people differ in their creative style along a continuum. At one end are adaptors, who prefer to “do things better” within the existing framework. At the other are innovators, who prefer to “do things differently” and question the framework itself.

His inventory, the KAI (Kirton Adaption-Innovation Inventory), has 32 items and is usually described with three subscales: originality, efficiency, and conformity to rules and the group.

Kirton’s most interesting contribution is that style is not level. An adaptor is no less creative than an innovator: they apply their creativity to a different kind of problem. That’s why the theory sees mixed teams as an advantage, as long as each style understands how the other works.

The quiz’s innovator profile closely resembles Kirton’s innovative pole. The difference is that our quiz is short and indicative, while the KAI is an instrument with decades of studies behind it.

What we know about the creative personality

Gregory Feist’s meta-analysis (1998) compared the personalities of scientists and artists with those of comparison groups, using the Big Five framework. Creative people were, on the whole, more open to experience and less conventional, and also less conscientious in the technical Big Five sense (less orderly and methodical). Openness and conscientiousness were among the largest differences.

That last finding helps explain this profile’s typical weak spot, which has nothing to do with ability: openness pulls toward the next idea, and conscientiousness is what keeps the previous one going until it’s finished.

Day to day

• Gets bored perfecting something that already works well; prefers reinventing it.
• Generates ideas easily, sometimes faster than it can develop them.
• Habitually questions “it’s always been done this way.”
• Gets more excited by the creative process than by repetition, even when repetition is profitable.

An example: in a bike shop that’s doing well, the adaptor improves the repair workshop’s booking system. The innovator proposes renting bikes on a monthly subscription. Both contribute; only one changes the business model, with more potential and more uncertainty.

The risk of scattering

The same flow of ideas that defines this profile can turn into scatter if it isn’t paired with the ability to execute.

The challenge isn’t to stop generating new ideas, but to filter which ones deserve to become something real and to sustain the effort needed to carry them out, instead of jumping to the next one as soon as it appears.

Zero to one: a popular-business reading

Peter Thiel, investor and author of Zero to One (2014), distinguishes two forms of progress. Horizontal progress takes something that already works and replicates it. Vertical progress does something that didn’t exist before: it goes from zero to one.

It’s a business book, not a study, but its distinction echoes Kirton’s: the adaptor improves and replicates, the innovator tries to create what doesn’t exist yet. Thiel also proposes a question for evaluating ideas:

What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

What he’s after isn’t a provocative opinion, but a conviction grounded in something others haven’t seen yet.

Complementary to other styles

The innovator style pairs well with the proactive doer, who supplies exactly the fast execution it sometimes lacks. The cautious strategist offers the planning counterpoint that can filter its ideas before launching them.

Want to see your own style? Take the entrepreneurial style quiz.

Sources

• Covin, J. G. and Slevin, D. P. (1989). Strategic management of small firms in hostile and benign environments. Strategic Management Journal, 10(1), 75-87.
• Feist, G. J. (1998). A meta-analysis of personality in scientific and artistic creativity. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2(4), 290-309. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0204_5
• Kirton, M. (1976). Adaptors and innovators: A description and measure. Journal of Applied Psychology, 61(5), 622-629. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.61.5.622
• Miller, D. (1983). The correlates of entrepreneurship in three types of firms. Management Science, 29(7), 770-791. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.29.7.770
• Thiel, P. and Masters, B. (2014). Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. Crown Business.