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Four Skills Tomorrow’s Innovation Workforce Will Need
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Four Skills Tomorrow’s Innovation Workforce Will Need

The young digerati will lead innovation, but they’ll also need to develop business awareness, an entrepreneurial attitude, bottom-line focus, and ethical intelligence.

Tucker J. Marion, Sebastian K. Fixson and Greg Brown
MIT Sloan Management Review, 2020
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7

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The world is changing at a breakneck pace. Can you tell where your company will be in a year? Three years? Ten? You can’t predict the future, but an assessment of your staff’s skills can give you a good idea of how prepared you are for disruption from robotics, AI, virtual reality, and a host of other technological advancements. Cultivate four key aptitudes in your workforce to gain a competitive advantage.

Summary

Digital, biological and physical advances are leading to a mismatch between workers’ skills and employers’ demands.

Varieties of new digital, biological and physical technologies are driving innovation in most industries and transforming the talent landscape for most companies. A mismatch of skills and job openings is the result: People feel they are either over- or underqualified, and companies struggle to fill their vacant jobs. To succeed at innovation, companies must define the skills they will need between 2020 and 2030.

Ten years of research suggest that digital transformations expose a lack of business-related skills rather than missing technical skills. Since firms won’t be able to replace their entire workforces with suitable experts, companies should emphasize reskilling their people to be able to relocate them to new roles.

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About the Authors

Greg Brown is the director of business development at global software company PTC. Tucker Marion is a professor at Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business. Sebastian Fixson is an associate dean of innovation at Babson College. 

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