T-Shaped Innovators Identifying the Right Talent to Support Service Innovation

Companies need to re-tune their talent engines to support a new generation of innovation. Today's workers need to be agile, able to collaborate and lead multidisciplinary teams, communicate across disciplinary and cultural divides, and become change agents who foster open innovation. Researchers and practitioners have developed a vocabulary for characterizing professionals' knowledge based on shapes, including I-shaped, Pi-shaped, H-shaped, dash-shaped, and T-shaped workers. The T-shaped worker, by contrast, has deep knowledge in just one area, but a good knowledge set and communication skills across many other areas. T-shaped people are characterized by a versatility that makes them uniquely suited to the needs of service innovators. The breadth and flexibility gives T-shaped people a set of boundary-spanning skills and attitudes that allow for enhanced adaptive and innovation capacity; at the same time the empathy and communication skills that make them adept at collaboration and teamwork also support the kind of close customer engagement required for advanced service innovation. Creating an ecosystem in which the company cocreates its offerings with customers gives T-shaped people an opportunity to build both broad capabilities and deep understanding of customer needs.