What do you think a police officer in the Chicago Police Force, a manager in a Fortune 500 company, a management consultant in one of big four consulting firms, a TEDx speaker and an executive director of the Center of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at a college have in common?
What if I told you they are all one and the same person!
Yup, this is the career trajectory of my next guest Dr. Karen Bartuch. Dr. Karen has certainly had a very unique and incredible career path and she shares her journey so candidly and openly with me in this podcast interview. I met Dr. Karen at an event and when I heard her introduce herself, I knew I had to chat with her.
Dr. Karen shares her unusual career path and how in every job, she had an opportunity to take on a more entrepreneurial role, starting initiatives and projects that led her to use creativity and innovation in more ways than she had ever imagined. Sometimes these opportunities and initiates were not easy and met a lot of resistance, but she preserved because she knew she was making a difference for the greater good. Even her Phd dissertation is in the study of innovation and entrepreneurship and as to what motivates employees to innovate. She looked at external factors as well as internal factors such as creative self-efficiency, company culture and generational cohort to understand its effect on innovation behavior. And she says her findings were quite surprising. “I spent a year trying to find differences in people of different generational cohorts but at the end I found that people across the board are actually very similar in their thought process. And their internal creative self-competence is one of the key things that affects their innovation behavior.
Now in her role as the director of the Center Of Innovation And Entrepreneurship at North Central College, she is using much of that research to provide practical skills for students and the community at large. She states that the World Economic Forum lists creativity as the number three skill that company are doing to be looking for by 2020. So her goal is to equip students with the necessary tools and mindset needed to be successful when they walk out of school and into the workforce.
Dr. Karen was a delight to speak with. She spoke with such passion about her desire to help entrepreneurs find their spark – that itch that makes them grab opportunities and ideas and really think outside the box when it comes to solving problems. Creativity does have a huge place in entrepreneurship and as entrepreneurs, we all need to understand this and nurture our internal creative self-competence to chase our dreams.
I know you are going to thoroughly enjoy getting to know Dr. Karen on this episode of CulturallyOurs.
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