Teoría de Gestión del Conocimiento de Gilberto Probst

Importance of Innovation Skills

Innovation is recognized as a key driver of growth in the 21stcentury economy. Organizations increasingly rely on innovation for their success in the constantly changing, globally competitive business environment. Innovation calls for a large number of people equipped with diverse skill sets that are not only conducive to continuous learning and change but also contribute to a multifaceted approach. It has been acknowledged that business programs need to do a better job in teaching and preparing students with innovation skills. A couple of important questions arise as we contemplate teaching innovation skills – what we need to teach and how we can teach them.

It has been suggested that innovation skills can be taught by focusing on the primary criteria that include creativity, critical thinking and problem solving, and communication and collaboration. In the process of learning to innovate, students need to be prepared to think creatively, work creatively with others, learn to implement innovations, reason effectively, use systems thinking, make judgement and decisions, solve problems, communicate clearly, and collaborate with others (Partnership For 21stCentury Skills, 2015). In a more simple description, one might say that innovation skills cover three basic areas: Thinking (customer focused thinking and problem solving), Telling (getting others on board and storytelling), and Doing (learning through experimentation).

Hoidn and Karkkainen (2014) identify three overlapping set of skills necessary for innovation. They include Technical Skills, Thinking and Creativity Skills and Social and Behavioral Skills, which are described as follows:

x Technical Skills including disciplinary know-what and know-how. Innovative or creative people often require specialist skills in their field – both in terms of knowledge and methods.

x Thinking and Creativity Skills such as curiosity, critical thinking, problem solving and making connections.

x Social and Behavioral Skills such as interest, engagement, self-directed learning, self-confidence, organization, communication (cross-cultural) collaboration, teamwork, and leadership.

Of the Thinking and Creativity Skills, creativity is noted to be an important source of innovation. Innovation tends to also require open-mindedness and critical questioning of well-established ideas or practices. While Technical Skills require specialist skills, Thinking and Creativity Skills and Social and Behavioral Skills require training in the way of questioning, thinking, listening, engaging, collaborating and communicating. It should be noted that two out of three major categories of innovation skills identified by Hoidn and Karkkainen, Thinking and Creativity and Social and Behavioral Skills are related to soft skills which are founded upon attitudinal and personal qualities of individuals such as open-mindedness, self-confidence, communication, and collaboration.

In a search of desirable soft skills for improving business education, studies have noted that employers perceive attitudinal qualities as important as knowledge and skills reported in previous studies and that many of the desirable attitudinal qualities are related to the ability to change and skills to innovate. For example, a study of marketing professionals found that employers looked for personal qualities such as openness, flexibility, and creativity as well as other desirable qualities such as communication, teamwork, and analytical and problem solving skills in marking hires (Lee, 2006). Another study identified listening skills and customer orientation as important factors for success in marketing career along with communication, analytical skills and tools, market research, and application skills (Walker et al., 2011). This implies that empathy, as the ability to listen to and relate with customers, is an important quality as well as creativity, open-mindedness, communication, and teamwork.

A study of UK employers found flexibility, willingness to learn, customer orientation, self-awareness, and confidence among the top employability attributes in marketing graduates (Heffernan et al., 2010). In a broader study of top ten marketing managers' competency, Montoya et al. (2010) found that half of the top ten competencies were classified as attitudes such as open-mindedness, anticipation, flexibility, developing others, and leadership. From an in-depth studies social innovators, Sherman (2011) identified seven important competencies that were essential for success. They include leadership (taking initiative and action), optimism (confidence and self-efficacy), grit (a combination of perseverance, passion, and hard work), resilience (in the face of adversities, obstacles, and failures), creativity and innovation (ability to think in unconventional way), empathy (ability to put themselves in the shoes of others), and emotional and social intelligence (ability to connect with others and building strong relationships).

In a more recent assessment of top 25 business programs, Ghannadian (2013) reported that while top 25 business schools have been successful in building graduates with business and leadership skills that employers consider

important, they have not always been successful in teaching ‘softer skills’ that employers prize. For example, in checking against important skills that employers identify as important, top 25 elite business schools have shown to have done a good job of equipping graduates of their MBA programs with skills such as Leadership, Business Ethics, Social Responsibility, Business Speaking, Change Management, Business Writing, Teamwork, Power and Responsibility, Decision Making, Organizational Behavior, Imagination and Creativity, and Employee Management. However, they have not shown to be successful in teaching other employer-desired skills such as Self-Awareness, Ability to Learn, Management of the Future, Perseverance, Time Management, Persistence and Empathy. The study further points out the importance of teaching these softer skill sets emphasizing the new AACSB accreditation standards that encourage business schools to give more weight to teaching the soft skills going forward (Ghannadian, 2013). It is noted that many of these soft skills are related to the ability to change and innovate. Essentially, attitudinal qualities of self-awareness, open-mindedness, flexibility, willingness to learn, and empathy reflect the necessary qualities of individuals and organizations in coping with changing business environments, which leads to continuous learning and to innovation with relevance.

The growing importance coupled with the persisting needs of employers indicate that business educators must be engage in developing the innate qualities of creativity, open-mindedness, flexibility, empathy, and confidence from students in addition to building the disciplinary competence and be mindful of instructional methods that may foster the desired outcomes. One of the challenges in this endeavor is identifying pedagogical methods that educators can use to help students develop these personal qualities and soft skills in the context of the topical interests.

Suggestions have been made with regards to methods and tools that enhance development of innovation skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, and collaboration. For example, student-centric approaches such as Project- Based Learning (Markham, 2013; Saurbier, 2014) and Problem-Based Learning (Hoidn and Karkkainen, 2014) can enhance development of innovation skills as students benefit from the direct engagement in problem solving. In addition, the hands-on problem solving experience can provide lasting impact on student learning as it builds confidence in the process (Lee, 2012; Wagner, 2012). While there are many other suggestions for improving student engagement (Sharbrough III and Fekula, 2014), critical thinking and confidence (Hart and Mrad, 2013), process orientation and team building (Lugar-Brettin, 2014), it is viewed that these suggestions are not necessarily mutually exclusive and that they can be incorporated into a more inclusive approach that covers the process, tools, and the project experiences. Design Thinking has been gaining notable attention from educators as well as practitioners as an effective and inclusive way of providing the process and tools for innovative problem solving (Brown, 2008; Liedtka, King and Bennett, 2013; Wagner, 2012; Coakley, Roberto and Segovis, 2014).

Design Thinking to Teach Innovation Skills

In search of pedagogical process and tools to instill the innovation skills, the Design Thinking approach came across as a potentially effective way for a number of reasons. The Design Thinking approach has been increasingly recognized for its effectiveness in bringing out innovation and change in various sectors. Design-oriented firms such as Apple and IDEO have demonstrated how design thinking can improve business results. Managers of various companies have creatively solved pressing issues by applying design thinking (Liedtka, King and Bennett, 2013). Educational institutions and programs of various types and sizes have successfully incorporated Design Thinking to foster innovative leadership education. In addition, there seems to be a “kinship” between the innovation skills and essential Design Thinking elements such as empathy, listening, collaboration, and experimentation (Wagner, 2012). Furthermore, the Design Thinking approach has been known to provide “a clear and teachable set of tools and processes” that can be used to solve business problems (Liedtka and Ogilvy, 2011).

Design Thinking is a process of creating and developing new and innovative ideas in order to solve problems. According to Tim Brown (2008), the CEO and the president of IDEO, Design Thinking is a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business can convert into customer value and market opportunity. In this matching process, Design Thinking combines empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights, and collaborations and rationality in analyzing and fitting various solutions to the problem context. Design projects, according to Tim Brown, must ultimately pass through three spaces of “Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation”. “Inspiration” is labeled for the circumstances (such as a problem, or opportunity, or both) that motivate the search for solutions; “ideation,” for the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas that may lead to solutions; and “implementation,” for the charting of a path to market. Projects will loop back through these spaces – particularly the first two – more than once as ideas are refined and new directions taken.

It is noted that Design Thinking, as a problem solving process, can have variations in specific number and labeling of steps, but by and large, go through the process of definition and research, ideation, prototyping, choosing, implementation, and learning. The entire cycle begins all over, with the previous ending point becoming the beginning of the next iteration. It is noted that the circular nature of the process enables managers to engage in continuous learning and stay relevant in the changing environment with strategic innovation.

Liedtka and Ogilvie, in their book Design for Growth (2011), view that Design Thinking fosters creative problem solving by bringing a systematic end-to-end process to the challenge of innovation and offer a process that examines four basic questions, which correspond to the four stages of design thinking as follows:

x What is?-- Explores current reality

x What if?-- Uses what one learns to envision multiple options for creating a new future

x What wows?-- Makes some choices about where to focus first

x What works?-- Takes one into the real world to interact with actual users through small experiments. While going through the process, managers can use various tools for different purposes including visualization, journey mapping, value chain analysis, mind mapping, brainstorming, concept development assumption testing, rapid prototyping, customer co-creation, and learning launch.

Essentially speaking, Design Thinking is considered a way to do the research that generates deep insights, translate these insights into new ideas, and get these ideas in front of people who will react to them and act with us to make them real (Liedkta, King and Bennett, 2013), all of which is the very foundation of disciplined creativity which leads to innovation with relevance. Furthermore, the circular nature of the Design Thinking process offers a built-in mechanism for continuous learning and innovation.

Considering the effectiveness of Design Thinking in fostering innovative problem solving, the Design Thinking method was adopted as a pedagogical approach to teaching the graduate course on Innovative Brand Management. The course was developed with the goals to equip MBA students with a Design Thinking toolkit and help them utilize tools and processes of Design Thinking in the context of innovative brand management. In addition, several aspects of Design Thinking seem especially appropriate for use in marketing courses.

Marketing is a business discipline that relies heavily on creativity and innovation from creating and branding products and services to promotion strategies. Marketing is also a discipline that is keying in on customer orientation and empathy. A disciplined creativity is a foundation for marketing relevance and a vital ingredient for successful marketing. One of the main teachings of Design Thinking is that everyone is a designer. What makes students creative is that they are not working in a vacuum; they are building off the Design Thinking principle of empathy with the user and engaging in the customer-oriented process of learning. Students are taught that it is absolutely imperative to see the world the way the customers do. The critical insight or ‘aha moment’—the hallmark of Design Thinking done well—makes for deep understanding of and communication with the user.

Other aspects of Design Thinking make it uniquely effective in teaching and developing empathy skills to marketing students. For instance, Design Thinking is a process that uses human-centered direct observation to develop products, services and strategies. Design Thinking relies on making empathetic connections with users, ideation, rapid prototyping, and testing and refinement—all in a continuum that may be more circular than linear.

The circular process encourages the students to engage with open-mindedness while assuring empathy. For example, one of the most powerful questions in Design Thinking is: “How Might we?” By nature, Design Thinking has the power of the question as part of the framing of the change. For example, it is not “how can we design a chair?” but “how can we suspend someone?” Reframing the problem leads to unexpected, new, impactful discoveries. Any product, service or strategy can be enhanced or completely upgraded using Design Thinking. It is believed that by teaching Design Thinking, we may not only equip students with a powerful skill set for changing the world but also inspire them to become better students, team members and professionals.