Have you already noticed? The Sixth Wave of technological innovation has started to crash upon us. With it comes a rising tide of AI tools, quantum capabilities, eco-conscious business models, and bio-digital convergence. Yet amid the swirl of artificial intelligence and automation, one truth rises with serene clarity: the future will still be human—especially in creativity, leadership, and innovation.

In the new disruptive age, machines compute, systems optimize, and algorithms predict. But only humans can imagine the unimaginable. Only humans can dream. Can feel. Can reframe a problem, connect unconnected dots, and spark the next big breakthrough idea that transforms entire industries. But how can you find out which people in your organization are those creative types that can lead and drive this creative transformation? How can you uncover what innovator types you have on board? Enter TIPS, Thinkergy’s Talent & Innovator Profiling System built for the realities and rhythms of the disruptive innovation economy of the early 21st century.

TIPS: A Profiling Tool with ROI Intelligence

Return on investment Is the language of the boardroom, the bottom line, and every quarterly report. Whether you’re a CFO, CEO, CHRO, or Chief Innovation Officer, sooner or later you’ll be asked: “So, what’s the ROI of this whole TIPS thing?”

Good question. And the good news? We have a clear, visual, strategic answer.

TIPS is Thinkergy’s Talent & Innovator Profiling System for the disruptive age of the Sixth Wave of technology innovation. Unlike most profiling systems, which generate interesting but often fluffy personality reports, I designed TIPS as a value activation framework—one that not only raises awareness and intelligence levels across the organization, but also moves the needle where it matters: talent performance, innovation outcomes, and financial results.

Welcome to ROI Intelligence—the cumulative financial and strategic return a company earns by applying the TIPS Profiling System consistently across the full Talent Lifecycle and the complete Innovation Journey.

Talent ROI: The Full Lifecycle

TIPS improves ROI by aligning people decisions with how talents naturally think, work, interact, and live. Here’s how it compounds value across the lifecycle:

1. Talent Acquisition: Profile candidates for cognitive fit, not just credentials. Right hires reduce mismatches and early attrition, improving quality of hire while lowering replacement costs—and lifting ROI.
2. Talent Onboarding: Onboard new hires in TIPS-specific ways. Role clarity, manager fit, and context alignment raise motivation and shorten time-to-productivity—a direct accelerator to ROI.
3. Talent Alignment: Place people where their profiles shine. The right person in the right role elevates engagement, teamwork, and functional effectiveness—increasing team performance and ROI.
4. Talent Mentoring: Match mentors and mentees by cognitive fit. Better transfer of knowledge, skills, and experience boosts motivation and performance, improves retention, and compounds ROI.
5. Talent Management: Manage by preferred cognitive styles. Conflicts decrease, empowerment increases, and engagement deepens—lifting both individual and team performance and, ultimately, ROI.
6. Talent Development: Send talents to cognitively fitting upskilling or reskilling programs and train them in line with preferred learning styles. Motivation, retention, and application go up; skill relevance and promotion readiness follow; external recruiting costs go down—ROI up.
7. Talent Transitioning: Move the right talent into the right new role. Motivation rises, ramp time drops, and internal mobility increases—lowering time-to-fill and hiring cost while protecting performance and ROI.
8. Talent Offboarding: Offboard in TIPS-specific, respectful ways. Alumni ties and employer brand strengthen—fueling referrals and boomerang hires, reducing acquisition costs, and reinforcing retention and ROI. Add a TIPS-guided knowledge capture step to protect continuity and value.

Bottom line: Talent ROI isn’t one lever—it’s an interlocking system. Every people decision aligned to TIPS nudges motivation, performance, and retention in the right direction—and those nudges add up.

Innovation ROI: Six Levers That Turn Ideas Into Results

Most innovation failures aren’t about a lack of ideas—they stem from misfit teams, unclear roles, imprecise task assignments, misaligned energies, or resistance to change. TIPS converts innovation from a gamble into a people-aligned engine:

1. Innovation Resourcing: Identify creative types and early adopters, then staff projects accordingly. The right innovators in the right projects raise contributions and success rates—cutting false starts and waste.
2. Innovation Alignment: Match profiles to innovation types (e.g., product, service, CX) and to process stages. Cognitive fit and role clarity increase efficiency and time-to-market—lifting ROI.
3. Innovation Leadership: Select innovation managers and creative leaders by profile. Better guidance, facilitation, and decision velocity improve project survival and execution quality—boosting ROI.
4. Innovation Culture: Enable everyone to contribute to corporate innovation in line with their strengths. Broad-based, profile-aligned participation turns innovation from a poster into a lived practice, growing durable capacity—and ROI.
5. Creative Process Stages & Tool Alignment: Invite the matching profiles to the right stages and assign them with the right thinking tools. Output quality rises; rework and cycle time fall; overall time investment (opportunity cost) declines—ROI rises.
6. Creative Change Resistance Understanding: Segment drivers, skeptics, and resisters (psychodynamic, psychoneutral, psychostatic). Involve, convince, and convert each group with targeted engagement. Adoption rises, resistance falls, and transformation speed improves—lifting ROI.

Bottom line: Innovation ROI scales when people, process, leadership, and culture align to how humans actually create—and TIPS provides the map.

Integration ROI: The Full Stack Advantage

The real power of TIPS is systemic. Start with talent awareness and alignment. Add hiring and onboarding. Layer in mentoring, development, and transitions. Wire innovation resourcing and process alignment on top. Before long, you’ve built a TIPS-enabled organization—a human-centric intelligence engine where Talent ROI and Innovation ROI continually reinforce each other.

At that point, ROI becomes exponential: fewer mis-hires and misfits, faster ramps, stronger pipelines, better projects, quicker adoption, and a culture that knows how to win the Sixth Wave.

Final Words for the CFO and C-Suite

CFOs, CEOs, CHROs, and CIOs — you ask the right question: “What’s the return?” But maybe now the better question is: “How much value are we missing by not doing this?”

TIPS doesn’t just improve talent and innovation. It connects them. It doesn’t just save costs. It activates value. And it doesn’t just describe people. It positions them where they can create value, lead, and perform in alignment with the Sixth Wave of Innovation. If that’s not worth the investment, what is?

• Care to Learn More About TIPS? Explore the TIPS website and download the free TIPS booklet to dive deeper into how the Talent & Innovator Intelligence Hub can energize your people and your business.
• Ready to Get TIPS-ed Yourself? Take the TIPS test and discover your own profile today. Buy your test coupon for USD 88.88 and start unlocking your cognitive strengths and innovation potential right away.
• Interested in a Global Partnership? Are you a global consulting firm, human capital development company, or international talent organization interested in scaling TIPS worldwide? Let’s talk. Together, we can amplify impact and make a global difference faster. Contact us to explore a partnership.

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2025.