A key aspect of any entrepreneurial enterprise is measuring the impact of the solutions you test. We are interested in building organizational capabilities for creating a culture of innovation. Bringing these two ideas together, we recently published research data studying the use of a tool to assess the entrepreneurial attitudes and mind-sets of innovators participating in government innovation programs. The longer-term hope for this work is to create a suite of tools that will help innovators, mentors, and organizational leaders target specific skills and attitudes as entrepreneurs. It is known that there is wide variation in attitudes towards risk taking, teamwork, sharing, and many other features.
This publication (The Assessment of Behavioural Attributes and Mind-set of Participants in Government Workforce Innovation and Entrepreneurship Programs: A Feasibility Study) presents research conducted with the US Department of Health and Human Services IDEA Lab and PAIRIN, a research collaborator based in Denver, CO that promotes educational approaches to entrepreneurship. What did we learn? First, this feasibility study gave us an understanding about how to approach and convey to innovators the concept and potential value of measuring behavior and attitudes as part of the cultural adaptation that organizations can engage in to build confidence and experience in testing new ideas. Second, we learned that the tool we used, applying the Adjective Checklist1, can be used reliably and consistently among innovators. Finally, although this study blinded the participants data from their mentors and coaches, we believe that this study sets the framework for assessing targeted coaching to specific attributes and measuring effect. We believe the next step is to test this approach in a cohort associated with coaching methods to mutually agreed upon goals to specific features.
Continuing with our efforts to measure what matters we want you to send us your comments and ideas as we continue our work to develop tools to help innovators and organizations in their entrepreneurial quests. Thank you to our colleagues at HHS, NIH, and PAIRIN for their roles in this study.
This publishing in the Journal of Entrepreneurship & Organization Management marks another milestone in our efforts to help organizations measure the effectiveness of their innovation programs and tailor their coaching efforts for better workforce outcomes. We performed research previously in understanding workforce perceptions of innovation within agencies helped lead to our most recent work. We look forward to further developing these methods, analyzing more data, and creating more impactful innovation programs and experiences.
Check out the article on the Journal of Entrepreneurship & Organization Management.
1 Gough, H. G. (1979). A creative personality scale for the Adjective Check List. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(8), 1398-1405.
