Adaptors, Innovators and the Kirton Adaption-Innovation Inventory

Abstract

Kirton (1976) has (1) elaborated a typology which contrasts the originalities of adaptive and innovative solutionists, (2) argued that his typology reflects a basic and unidimensional trait of personality related to the sponsorship of competing kinds of institutional change, and (3) developed a test, Kirton's Adaption-Innovation Inventory, to distinguish the adaptive from the innovative-minded solutionists. However, Kirton's method of scoring for a general factor of adaptiveness-innovativeness lacks face validity. A new method of scoring the inventory, based on a three-factor solution, provides face validity for the test and, in contrast with Kirton's method, exhibits appropriate relations with performance measures of originality, and separates criterion group adaptors from innovators. Subjects were 303 high school students.