The key soft skills to innovate

Innovating well does not only rely on the technical skills of your teams. Soft skills are essential to manage an innovation project, find the right idea and succeed in selling it. We have refined our innovative DNA over the years, by structuring a very secure approach, by developing specific tools, by drawing inspiration from the various sectors of activity for which we work, but above all by bringing together a team of innovators! Thanks to our experience, we can provide you with the key soft skills to innovate.

How to develop your soft skills?

Seeing the world through the eyes of a child

Being positively intolerant is a soft skill required of a good innovator.

Develop an extremely critical eye to quickly pick up on what is accepted and what could ultimately be much better. Having the ability to point out the obvious that isn't obvious, to keep an eye out for anything that could be better, to look at something you've seen before and suddenly see it differently, with a fresh eye.

This emotional skill is essential for any innovation: knowing how to detect a problem and make sure it's a burning pain point for your customers, for your consumers. There are, of course, methods, tools and techniques to capture these frustrations. But above all, you need to be able to empathize, to understand exactly what is important to people and what isn't, to decipher non-verbal language, to assess the criticality of a pain point and focus on the most burning issue.

Key soft skills for capturing burning pain points:

• Empathy
• Listening
• The observation
• The critical sense

To have a thirst for learning, again and again, to feed your creativity

Knowledge of the world around us, technological curiosity, general culture, artistic culture, knowledge of nature, etc. or having seen the latest science fiction movie, all this represents essential food for creativity.
We are inspired, we feed each other, we share constantly to create, imagine and refine innovative solutions.

A specific soft skill for innovation is the ability to create links. These mental bridges generate new solutions from acquired knowledge.
To give you an example, we are working on new waiting experiences in public places that are scalable depending on the traffic. A great concept was created by one of our innovators based on the movie Star Trek! He was able to step back from the subject and take inspiration from a science fiction reference.

We are not only talking about technology transfer, but also about a way to develop automatic creativity and thought bounce around given problems. Here are some examples of questions you can ask yourself to create these mental bridges: In what other sector is this problem present? Where in nature is this function needed? What other profession has the same need?

The key soft skills to stimulate your creativity:

• Knowledge and general culture
• Curiosity
• The mental mesh reflex

Doubt your ideas... with perseverance!

Innovation is by definition a field of uncertainty, with many unknowns in the equation. You must not doubt yourself, but you must doubt your idea. You have to question it constantly to force yourself to test it, experiment with it, refine it. Ideas are incubated, worked on and digested at the same time as the project's learning curve. You must be humble and have a high capacity to adapt in order to bounce back and pivot when necessary.

Adam Grant (American psychologist and author), in his excellent TED talk "The surprising habits of original thinkers", illustrates this characteristic very well by taking the example of Martin Luther King. The night before his famous speech, he went to bed at 3 a.m. to modify, complete and reformulate it. Sitting in the audience, 10 minutes before going on stage, he was still taking notes, crossing out lines. He went on stage and left his speech aside to pronounce the 4 words that have marked history forever "I have a dream". This was not planned and, until the last minute, he remained open to new ideas.

Innovators fail a lot because they test a lot. They are persevering and pragmatic in order to bounce back from each learning experience and to remain in a dynamic of "doing," "acting.

The key soft skills to find the right idea:

• Humility
• Adaptability
• The enthusiasm
• Perseverance

Be a good speaker with excellent persuasiveness

The super power of an innovator? Knowing how to convince!

How do you recruit and unite your teams around a project with so many uncertainties and hazards? How do you recruit your first customers when your solution is not yet developed? How to convince bankers or investors to put money into your project?

It is essential to know what motivates people, to develop leadership and to know how to convince.

The key soft skills to sell your innovation project:

• The ability to convince
• Communication
• Leadership

Surround yourself with an organic, lively and passionate team of innovators

An innovator is above all a human being, a unique and complex being with his or her specificities and ambiguities. It would be simplistic to reduce the list to a few human qualities and skills. Putting together teams of innovators with complementary soft skills in order to cross the diversity of profiles, expertise and personalities is an often complex but extremely rich step.

Finally, an innovator is revealed in a team and an organization that allows innovation. Allowing the right to make mistakes, to learn, to freedom of action and decision, but also to the acceptance of self-organization by everyone.

The Dynergie Academy, our internal innovation school, was created to give our teams the means to grow at their own speed and according to their desires. We have also surrounded ourselves withACT4Talent, an academy specialized in soft skills to allow each of our innovators to know themselves better; "what we like to do", "what we know how to do", "what we want to do".

We are convinced that innovation is above all a lot of human and that knowing oneself better is a key to feeling alive, dynamic and fully realized as an innovator!

Getting ready to launch your innovation project? Consider these 5 fundamentals to help you strengthen your innovative soul:

• Seeing the world through the eyes of a child
• To have a thirst for learning, again and again, to feed your creativity
• Doubt your ideas... with perseverance!
• Be a good speaker with excellent persuasiveness
• Surround yourself with an organic, lively and passionate team of innovators

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