Is your glass half-full?

I’ve been curious about the role optimism plays in leadership, and I am always on the lookout for research that examines whether successful leaders see the glass as half-full. Many of the related surveys I see query optimism about external conditions, particularly the economy. ExecuNet even conducts a monthly Recruiter Confidence Poll that measures something relevant. (By the way, 66 percent of search consultants are confident/very confident that the executive market will improve in the next six months — up from 61 percent in April and 52 percent in March.)

“Thanks in part to an aging workforce and global economic growth, the demand for executive talent continues to increase while the threat of a recession looms.” says Mark Anderson, president and chief economist at ExecuNet.

Despite evidence that the economy could continue to shed temporary and entry-level jobs, recruiting and retaining executive-level talent will remain a challenging priority for companies in 2008. Following a healthy 24 percent increase in search assignments in 2007, more than 70 percent of search firm and corporate human resource professionals believe there is a shortage of executive talent, and two-thirds (67 percent) say the war for executive talent has intensified over the last year amid increasing economic uncertainty.



Highlights from the 2008 Executive Job Market Intelligence Report:

Companies innovate by making incremental product improvements inspired largely by market research that looks to fill needs. New product development of the future, it can be argued, will actually be accomplished by communities of user groups feeding cool stuff they want to use into manufacturers who make it happen. And now, Denmark has become the first to say it will pay incentives to companies who align with their open innovators rather than in-house R&D to create new products. Expect EU partners to follow.

Over the last 30 years, market-changing, mega-income producing new products have largely been created with a single market research method: find a need and fill it.

Simple.

Yes, but increasingly ineffective, says MIT/Sloan School of Management Professor of Innovation Management Eric von Hippel. His exhaustive study of multiple industries and innovations shows that in most cases, the truly ground-shaking product innovations come from the the most ignored part of the market curve: the user’s own invention.

“All markets are small and uncertain at the beginning; users experience need well ahead of manufacturers and are usually ignored by companies because they are few in number,” Dr. von Hippel just told hundreds of global business strategists attending the World Innovation Forum in New York.

Why? Because, Dr. von Hippel says, users innovate to develop something they can use the way they want to use it as opposed to companies who innovate largely when they see the potential to sell something. Products created this way include the heart and lung machine, the jogger baby stroller, the mountain bike, the Dyson vacuum cleaners, and endless software and IT systems.