Often, though, innovation leaders make poor choices when hiring staff. This is because they hire people whom they think will be great at innovating, but who actually turn out very little that drives new services and products.

Research suggests there are some key failure-inducing individuals you can watch out for. Here are the main ones you’d be better off avoiding:

The Gadgeteer. A gadget is something very interesting to an innovator. It seems, on the one hand, to be a fantastic addition to any innovation portfolio, so long as it is sold correctly to stakeholders. On the other, though, there is almost always no way to tie whatever-it-is back to any business problem. This is the key trait of the Gadgeteer – they pursue shiny new things without any linkage to any business problem that needs solving.

The CowBoy. This is the innovator so committed to their specific innovations, they’ll allow nothing to stand between them and success. They chase anything and everything needed to make new things happen, and they do it no matter what stands in their way. This seems like a good characteristic for an innovator, but in reality it is very short sighted. Cowboys may get one innovation accepted, but they will have significant difficulty getting the second and later ones out the door. They will have burned too many bridges getting their first success. The danger of the CowBoy is they are detrimental to the long term success of an innovation programme.

The Defeatist. Hiring a Defeatist isn’t damaging to an innovation programme, excepting that it wastes headcount. Defeatists will sit around all day and achieve nothing, and here is the reason: they look at new things through eyes which focus on the monumental challenges in making change, without accepting the positive benefits of doing so. Their response to anything innovative is “that’s too innovative for us” or “we’re not ready for that yet”. But the underlying reason for all this prevarication is the Defeatist doesn’t have enough influence to make things happen, and doesn’t want to admit it.

The Consultant. The opposite of Gadgeteers, Consultant-Innovators spend all their time focussing on the business problem. They concentrate so hard on defining it they never get to a solution. Consultant-Innovators spend all their time generating reports and requirements documents, and very little on defining innovative responses.

The Talker. A superlative communicator, you can put a Talker on a stage with a crowd, and you’ll get an energising result. The Talker is also a magic network and can get meetings with anyone. However, despite all this, nothing much ever happens, because the Talker doesn’t do execution.

The Lone Ranger. Lone Rangers are innovators who prefer to work alone. They like to have everything under their personal control, cannot bear to delegate any work to anyone, and need to be personally involved in every single, little detail of their innovations.They imagine they, and they alone, are all it will take to get an innovation out the door. They engage in individual heroics to make try to move things along, but usually fail to deliver much because almost all innovations require a team of people to actually get things to happen.

The second you determine you have a terrible innovator in your team, you should remove them. If they can’t be fired for some reason, you need to sideline them quickly, because they have a powerfully negative effect on an innovation programme. Of course, the best course would be to avoid hiring them in the first place.

In the end, the challenge of starting an innovation programme is big enough by itself. You don’t need Terrible Innovators around to make it harder.

If you’re managing an innovation programme, check out www.futureproofbank.com to find detailed excerpts on the Terrible Innovators.