To be innovant, you have to develop the following competences:
No I'll describe each competence and explain why it's important to be innovative.
1) Divergence:
It's your capacity to produce different propositions from a single idea. It's important because innovation is linked to the skill to propose new ideas.
2) Convergence:
It's the capacity to gather ideas. If you have lot of ideas but you can't focus and make a single objective, you will never act to realize your goals. Furthermore, by combining ideas you obtain news, the best example is smartphone, a combination of a phone and many other features. Smartphone is an innovation although each feature existed separately.
3) Flexibility :
An innovator has to evolve with his environment. If you launch a startup and you see the market evolves, you have to develop your startup in agreement with the demand of customers. Flexibility, can be see as reactivity. The environment will challenge you and if you don't react accordingly, you cannot become a successful innovator.
4) Open minded :
It's very important to be Open minded and curious to produce new ideas. You're brain ask only to be feed and you have to be build knowledge to link concepts that you ever seen to produce new one. A famous adage says that for knowledge, 1+1=3...
5) Motivation :
It's necessary to trust in your goals to achieve them. If your not motivate, it's probably because you evolve in a field that doesn't interest you. Be open minded and try new things to discover what moves you.
6) Optimism :
This is the basis of everything. Think to your success and he will have a chance to arrive. Optimism is also a source of motivation, if you trust in your idea, you will be motivate to achieve your goal.
7) Independence :
You need to have an important radius of action and your environment shall not limit yourself. If you can explore many ways you will be a better innovator.
8) Collaboration :
It's difficult to be innovant alone because an innovation is the result of a combination of several competencies. It's important to cloak yourself with persons having different skills because an innovative project combines an important number of areas of expertise. Having colleagues also helps to have different visions of the project.
For an innovator is really important to work in team and to communicate efficiently.
To sum up, innovation is different to creativity. To be innovant you have to develop more skills and to work with colleagues. The strength of an innovator is also to know how to surround itself.
@fibonacco