Key soft skills for innovation

Effective innovation doesn’t rely solely on your teams’ technical skills. Soft skills are essential for leading an innovation project, coming up with the right idea, and successfully bringing it to market. We have refined our innovative DNA over the years by developing a highly reliable approach, creating specialized tools, drawing inspiration from the various industries we serve, and, above all, by assembling a team of innovators! Thanks to our experience, we can equip you with the key soft skills needed to innovate.

How can you develop your soft skills?

See the world through the wide-eyed wonder of children

Being positively intolerant—that’s a soft skill expected of a good innovator.

Develop an extremely critical eye so you can quickly discern what is accepted as standard and what could actually be much better. Have the ability to point out the obvious when it’s not so obvious, to stay on the lookout for anything that could be improved, and to look at something you’ve already seen and suddenly see it differently, with fresh eyes.

This emotional intelligence is essential for any innovation: knowing how to identify a problem and ensure that it is a pressing pain point for your customers and consumers. There are, of course, methods, tools, and techniques for gathering this feedback. But above all, you need to be able to demonstrate empathy to gain a nuanced understanding of what matters to people and what doesn’t, to interpret nonverbal cues, to assess the severity of a pain point, and to focus on the most pressing issues.

Key soft skills for identifying critical pain points:

• Empathy
• Listening
• Observation
• Critical thinking

Have a constant thirst for learning to fuel your creativity

Knowledge of the world around us, curiosity about technology, general knowledge, artistic culture, an understanding of nature, and so on—or even having seen the latest science fiction movie—all of these are essential fuel for creativity.
We draw inspiration from one another, we feed off each other’s ideas, and we constantly share in order to create, imagine, and refine innovative solutions.

A specific soft skill needed for innovation is the ability to make connections. These mental bridges generate new solutions based on acquired knowledge.
To give you an example, we’re working on new waiting experiences in public spaces that can be adapted based on crowd levels. One of our innovators came up with an excellent concept inspired by the movie Star Trek! He was able to step back from the subject and draw inspiration from a science fiction reference.

We’re not just talking about technology transfer, but about a way to develop creative thinking patterns and generate new ideas around specific problems. Here are a few examples of questions you can ask yourself to create these mental bridges: In what other industry does this problem exist? In what natural setting is this function necessary? What other profession faces the same need?

Key soft skills to boost your creativity:

• Knowledge and general knowledge
• Curiosity
• The mental networking reflex

Question your own ideas… with perseverance!

Innovation is, by definition, a realm of uncertainty, with many unknowns in the equation. You shouldn’t doubt yourself, but you should question the idea. You must constantly challenge it to force yourself to test it, experiment with it, and refine it. Ideas incubate, evolve, and take shape alongside the project’s learning curve. You must be humble and highly adaptable to bounce back and pivot when necessary.

Adam Grant (an American psychologist and author), in his excellent TED Talk “The Surprising Habits of Original Thinkers,” illustrates this trait very well using the example of Martin Luther King. The night before his famous speech, he stayed up until 3 a.m. to edit, expand, and rephrase it. Sitting in the audience, 10 minutes before taking the stage, he was still taking notes and crossing out lines. He stepped onto the stage and set his speech aside to deliver the four words that have forever marked history: “I have a dream.” It wasn’t planned, and right up until the last minute, he remained open to new ideas.

Innovators fail often because they experiment a lot. They are persistent and pragmatic, using each lesson learned from the project to bounce back and maintain a mindset of “doing” and “taking action.”

The key soft skills for coming up with the right idea:

• Humility
• Adaptability
• Enthusiasm
• Perseverance

To be a good speaker with a strong ability to persuade

An innovator’s superpower? The ability to persuade!

How do you recruit and rally your teams around a project with so many uncertainties and risks? How do you attract your first customers when your solution hasn’t even been developed yet? How do you convince bankers or investors to put money into your project?

It is essential to understand what motivates people, to develop leadership skills, and to know how to persuade others.

Key soft skills for pitching your innovation project:

• The power of persuasion
• Communication
• Leadership

Surround yourself with a dynamic, vibrant, and passionate team of innovators

An innovator is, above all, a human being—a unique and complex individual with their own particular traits and complexities. It would be reductive to boil them down to a list of a few human qualities and skills. Building teams of innovators with complementary soft skills to bring together diverse profiles, areas of expertise, and personalities is often a complex but extremely rewarding process.

Ultimately, an innovator thrives in a team and an organization that fosters innovation. This involves allowing room for error, learning, and freedom of action and decision-making, as well as embracing each individual’s ability to self-organize.

The Dynergie Academy, our in-house school focused on our work in innovation, was created to empower our teams to grow at their own pace and according to their own interests. We have also partnered withACT4Talent, an academy specializing in soft skills, to help each of our innovators better understand themselves—to “know what they love to do,” “what they’re good at,” and “what they want to do.”

We firmly believe that innovation is, above all, about people, and that getting to know ourselves better is key to feeling alive, energetic, and fully realizing our potential as innovators!

Are you about to launch your innovation project? Keep these 5 principles in mind to help you strengthen your innovative spirit:

• See the world through the wide-eyed wonder of children
• Have a thirst for learning, always and forever, to fuel your creativity
• Question your own ideas… with perseverance!
• To be a good speaker with a strong ability to persuade
• Surround yourself with a dynamic, vibrant, and passionate team of innovators

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