Editor's note: Julie Wittes Schlack is senior vice president, innovation at Boston research firm Communispace.

Companies aspire to innovate, both internally and in collaboration with their customers. But despite all of the talk about innovation, there is remarkably little public conversation about the individual and group qualities required to spark and implement it. Is innovation imposed by solitary and driven geniuses like Steve Jobs? Or is it more likely to be fueled by hundreds of thousands of passionate brand fans populating e-suggestion boxes? Are innovators right-brained, out-of-the-box-thinking creative artists or systematic left-brained thinkers able to spot the gaps in existing processes or product suites?

In partnership with our clients at Hallmark Cards, we set out to explore these questions, with the goal of helping ourselves and our clients become more self-aware and effective in how they both partner with consumers and interpret what they’re hearing from them.

Predictably, the answer is more nuanced than any of these stereotypes would suggest. According to Idea Connection Systems Inc., there are 12 unique orientations drawn from multiple aspects of mental functioning that affect how we prefer to approach innovation: how people think (cognitive), take instinctive action (conative) and meet their personal relational needs (affective). They’ve developed an assessment, the Strengths Preference Indicator (SPI), which measures two complementary elements:

• Your Innovation Orientation (IO), which indicates where along the innovation continuum you’re innately predisposed to work, from evolutionary (incremental) at one end, to revolutionary (breakthrough) at the other.

• Your Innovation Orientation Modifiers (IOM), which provide insight into your behavioral approach to innovation – how you seek information, make decisions, get energized, work with others and take action.

Management at Hallmark – a greeting-card and media company populated by a high proportion of artists, writers and other creative professionals – has embraced the SPI as a means of enhancing internal teams in a business operation that depends on continuous innovation. But Nancy Cox, the consumer understanding and insight manager at Hallmark, wanted to turn her focus outward and systematically explore how the SPI profile of consumers in her private online community influenced:

• what types of activities they chose to participate in, as measured by an analysis of participation based on both activity type (e.g., survey, discussion, media gallery, etc.) and activity purpose (e.g., feedback, co-creation, etc.); and

• the product input and feedback that they offered, as measured by classifying the type of language they used (e.g., aesthetic, other-oriented, operational, etc.).

To answer those questions, we invited members to take the SPI survey, then populated their member profiles with their orientation attributes. We were then able to use those attributes as cut variables in analyzing the data.

Clear patterns

Though working with a relatively small sample of members (175) and a limited set of activities (25), some clear patterns emerged in people’s preferences. For example, cognitively concrete thinkers – people who tend to focus on sensory and quantifiable information, to accrue details in order to incrementally build towards the big picture – participate heavily in mobile diary activities. This makes sense, given that the structure of Communispace’s On–the-Go mobile app mirrors that approach, enabling users to submit a series of detailed entries that provide, in aggregate, a coherent portrait of a time period or aspect of life. In contrast, visionary thinkers – people who value seeing the entire forest before focusing on the trees and are motivated by their imaginative vision of what could be – seem to favor media galleries and participate less in surveys than do other SPI types (Figure 1).

By the same token, builders – people who are methodical, precise, more concerned with solving problems than with finding them and who seek solutions in proven ways – favor surveys over other activity types. Clearly the defined scope and generally closed-ended nature of survey questions appeals to their innovation orientation. In contrast, pioneers – fluid, unconventional thinkers who redefine problems by questioning existing assumptions, think tangentially and tend to take control in unstructured situations – are over-represented in media galleries, most notably one in which members were invited to share their own do-it-yourself creations and solutions.

These findings provide more evidence for what we empirically know, which is that it’s crucial to provide consumers with multiple modes of participation. Surveys alone, while scalable, fail to tap into the full breadth and dimension of self-expression and innovation.

Our analysis of the kinds of language different types of people use when providing feedback on concepts reinforces this principle. We looked at members’ feedback in 10 separate surveys, each of which asked the same basic questions about various products’ probable usage and appeal (or lack thereof). With the help of a text analytics tool called Luminoso, we classified the language used in people’s responses as aesthetic (pretty, ugly, etc.), emotional (love, hate, etc.), other-oriented (my kids, my husband, etc.), envisioning (imagine, visualize, etc.) and/or operational (construct, fix, repair, etc.).

While we found some correlations between the types of language used and SPI orientation attributes (such as the propensity of pioneers to use envisioning language in some surveys), we saw much less differentiation than in our analysis of participation by activity type. Aesthetic and emotional language prevailed across the board, followed by other-oriented language. While envisioning and operational language was used up to 29 percent of the time in some surveys, people essentially responded to pictures of products and questions about appeal with language reflecting how those products looked and how they felt about them.

We get what we ask for

The moral? When conducting research, we get what we ask for. Generic feedback-seeking surveys are likely to yield largely aesthetic and emotional responses. If we want to elicit more information about how people imagine actually assembling, using or maintaining products, we need to ask questions in a different, more explicit way. Or better still, we should employ other types of interactions – such as in-home usage testing, image annotations and brainstorms – to elicit a more diverse set of responses.

Because she and we believe that research should have impact, Hallmark’s Nancy Cox is putting these findings to work. “These results will inspire us to use a broader range of tools and techniques when engaging our consumers,” she says, “and stop trying to accomplish everything in a single survey.” But she doesn’t stop there. “As importantly, these results remind us that our own profiles influence what we choose to listen to. Embracing diversity will keep us honest but we have to recognize it first.”

Spoken like a true visionary.