The questions
Perhaps one of the most important questions facing business today, especially those seeking more innovation, are:
• What characteristics or attributes signal innovation capability in an individual?
• Can we distil what makes Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison and other leading innovators so successful?
What makes an innovator tick?
In The Innovator’s DNA, authors Dyer, Gregersen and Christensen set out to uncover what makes good innovators tick, and separate the myth from the observable science. Eight years in the making, surveying 500 innovators, 5000 executives from 75 countries. The book looks at IPod v Sony Walkman, Starbucks beans v trad coffee shops, Skype use “free” to beat AT&T and British Telecom, EBay crushes classified ads.
How can you do it?
How did those businesses do it and more importantly how can I do it? 1500 CEO’s in IBMs survey site “Creativity the no 1 leadership competency of the future” Many of the innovators (or their companies) studied for the book will be familiar to most readers: Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, (Amazon) Michael Dell, Richard Branson, Howard Schultz (Starbucks), Scott Cook (Intuit), Peter Thiel (PayPal), Pierre Omidyar (eBay), Niklas Zennstrom (Skype) and many others.
Early on in the book you get a good summary in a diagram that shows creative innovators
(1) have the courage to innovate, as shown in their ability to challenge the status quo and take risks;
(2) incorporate the behavioural skills of observing, questioning, networking and experimenting, (the new learned behaviours) which lead to
(3) associative thinking that ultimately leads to innovative business ideas.
Just to give you an idea on how that works. The brain doesn’t store information as a dictionary alphabetically with theatre under the letter T. Theatres can be associated with Broadway, ice cream at the intermission or anxiety; because as a kid you remember the time you fell off the stage at the school play. So the more diverse knowledge the brain possesses the more connections it can make given fresh inputs of knowledge and then these fresh inputs trigger the associations that lead to novel ideas.
Bookbuzz plug
So say for example, that’s why when you use the fresh thinking, and latest insights from the most up to date business books( something we are passionate about) that these act as a triggering mechanism - that fires your imagination - that then leads to other unexpected associations that act as powerful and essential supplements of data, for working through a problem. They are critical creative tools that help generate strategic insights. So instead of say in, Nicholas Carr’s book the Shallows ,where we are turning into pancake people spread wide and thin and no depth -here you create a wider web of neural connections and you create an “Associating Muscle” for Innovative thinking.
The conclusion of the book is that when engaged in consistently, these actions—questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting—triggered associational thinking to deliver new businesses, products, services, and/or processes.
Women innovators
When I did the piece on Newstalk this morning I only noticed then that the book didn’t really mention any women innovators “maybe they aren’t creative enough, innovative enough etc” – I said. Quite rightly, I got a slap on the back of the head when I got home. “Why didn’t I take the opportunity to show the glaring error and mention the 100s of innovative women entrepreneurs out there”? And look there are tons – but why weren’t they covered in this book? Was the research criteria too stringent? I had to go back and do a double take.
The study that the book used, included 4 types of innovators
1. Start-up entrepreneurs
2. Corporate entrepreneurs(those who launch an innovative venture from within their own corporation)
3. Product innovators(those who invent a new product)
4. Process innovators(those who launch a breakthrough process )
Mention was made of Claudia Kotchka VP in P& G but no one else in their top list of most innovative companies ranked by innovation premium. Is this another glass ceiling or it just so happens that all of the companies listed are run by blokes?
Listen to Alan talk about the book here;
