People like to know how they rank — think of handicaps in golf, the colored belts in karate, and degrees in education. When Apple’s Steve Jobs passed away, it made me think about levels of mastery in innovation, distinguished by different levels of knowledge, experience and achievement. The Innovation Mastery Pyramid is a classification system for innovators. As you move up the pyramid, the breadth and depth of knowledge, experience and achievement in innovation increase, while the number of peers decreases.

Bozos

The basement of the innovation mastery pyramid comprises those who do not value creativity and innovation, despite the evident benefits. We use Steve Jobs’ term for non-performers to label those who dismiss innovation — because of unawareness, inability, or stubborn ignorance — as innovation “bozos.”

Dreamers

Innovation dreamers are a step above the bozos. Innovation is commonly defined as ideas plus action or implementation. Dreamers create ideas, but fail to do anything about them, whether out of laziness or complacency, fear of ridicule, or being too busy.

Novices

Next are people who are new to the field of innovation, and have an active interest in learning more. These innovation novices read books and articles on creativity and innovation, attend conferences and talks, and attend creativity or innovation training courses. Although their natural creativity may be lower than that of dreamers, their active learning puts them a step above.

Apprentices

As novices start applying their innovation knowledge in their daily work, they become innovation apprentices. An apprentice might use a thinking tool in a meeting, apply a creativity technique to generate ideas, or use a systematic innovation method while working on a project.

Practitioners

Innovation practitioners are those who perform real-life innovation projects, often leading a team to turn an idea into reality. This experience gives innovation practitioners deeper insights into what it takes to produce tangible innovation results.

Guides

Innovation process experts who have gained expertise in guiding other innovators become innovation guides. Their broad knowledge and deep understanding of the innovation process allow them to guide others in innovation, although they have not yet produced an innovation by themselves.

Champions

An innovation champion has, at least once, successfully turned a meaningful idea into something tangible in the world. This could be a new product or service that has been delivered to users, a new solution that is in use, or something new that customers have experienced.

Heroes

Innovation heroes have spent a long time working in innovation and have a track record of meaningful innovation. This elite group includes such people as James Dyson, Charles F. Kettering, Edwin Land, and Art Fry. Within Thailand, the inventions and creations over decades of hard, passionate work, certainly qualify His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej as an innovation hero.

Legends

At the top of the innovation pyramid are those few innovators who have achieved multiple radical innovations in different areas that created great value, often leading to the creation of entirely new industries. For example, Thomas Edison earned 1,093 patents and invented the incandescent light bulb and the gramophone. His inventions enabled the creation of companies such as General Electric. Similarly, Steve Jobs of Apple not only drove the creation of groundbreaking new products such as the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, but also new business models such as the iTunes Music Store. The enormous value created by legends, coupled with the scope of change, distinguishes them from innovation heroes.

Conclusion

Having developed a range of value-adding new thinking tools and an integrated system around the Thinkergy X-IDEA innovation method, I see myself as an innovation champion. In the years to come, I, together with the internal product development team at Thinkergy, will activate other innovations in our pipeline, such as an innovation profiling typology and an individual creativity training system, and someday, perhaps, move up to a higher level on the Innovation Mastery Pyramid.

Where are you on the Innovation Mastery Pyramid? Where would you like to be? And how will you get there? In this “innovation economy,” one thing is for certain: the further up the pyramid you are, the better off you’ll be.

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2011. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 9 December 2011.