It is possible to tell if someone is an innovator in the very first interview — but only if you ask the right questions.
A post on the Booz & Company blog, strategy+business, shares these questions. The post was written by Lisa Bodell, founder and CEO of futurethink, an innovation research and training firm, and author of the book "Kill the Company." After posing these innovation-driven questions, Ms. Bodell advises hiring managers to beware of candidates who generalize or toss around business jargon instead of specifics. "If you hear words or phrases like 'collaboration' or 'paradigm-shifting' without specific examples, you're interviewing an armchair innovator," she wrote.
She also says hiring managers should be on the look out for tales of industry best practices versus the candidate's own experiences. "When I'm interviewing people, I want to know what they thought of their own leadership experience and the innovations they created — not how much they admire Apple's or Google's approach to innovation," wrote Ms. Bodell.
Here are the 14 questions she says can help distinguish a true innovator.
Strategic imagination
1. If you had one month and a $50,000 budget to tackle any project, what would it be?
2. Which external jolts or wild cards have the potential to significantly impact our industry?
3. Which new customer segments will emerge in five years? How will those customers discover our product?
Provocative inquiry
4. What are the unshakable industry beliefs about what customers want? What if the opposite was true?
5. You have five minutes with our CEO. What question(s) would you ask that would make him or her rethink our business?
Creative problem-solving
6. What steps do you take when you need to make an immediate decision but don't have much data available?
7. Which systems, methodologies or standards were changed in your previous organization because of your suggestions? How did it benefit the company?
8. In which situations do you seek the help of others for decisionmaking?
Agility
9. What do you do when priorities shift quickly? Give me an example.
10. Tell me about a decision you made while under intense pressure.
11. Share an example of a time when you were given new information that affected a decision you had already made. How did you proceed?
Resilience
12. Give me an example of when you failed at something. How did you react?
13. You've presented a great idea to management, but they're not buying in. What's your next move?
14. Imagine you're leading one of our product development teams. You're months away from launch and your tech or marketing budget has been cut in half. What do you do?
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Healthcare Execs on Innovation: 35 Survey Findings
5 Things the Most Innovative Health Systems Do Differently
How Ideas Become Innovations: Roundtable With Healthcare Innovation Leaders From UCLA, Ohio State