The "In-Factor": Signature Traits Of Innovation’s Leaders

Abstract

This paper was inspired by the 2013 film Jobs, the docu-drama about Apple founder and longtime CEO Steve Jobs whose leadership style in some ways so contradicted contemporary leadership prototypes that he is sometimes said to depict the “anti-leader.” That film triggered this question: Are there attributes that, regardless of behavioral bent, those who lead innovation share? Through a review of academic and practitioner literature an “IN-factor” such leaders share emerges: The intention and insistence to be trailblazers. Though leaders of innovation travel different paths and are not all alike, though some are mavericks and others break through existing challenges, though some are founders and others are successors, though some are college educated and others are not, these “Imagineers” share ten signature traits which this paper establishes should it be helpful to contemporary leadership education, development, and training.