Missing Strategy Ingredient?
Innovation: The Missing Ingredient
Most organizations are so entrenched in bureaucracy and internal politics that they shut down the doors to innovation. Innovation is the missing ingredient in most enterprises. And yet, innovation is transforming labor, capital, markets, products, and services.
The Innovator's DNA
How do you create a culture of innovation? Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen and Clayton Christensen offer insights in their book The Innovator's DNA. The authors started their research by asking the question, “where does innovation come from?” They didn’t claim to have the answers. The launched a team that spent eight years seeking answers to the question. They interviewed founders and CEOs of game-changing companies, 100 revolutionary inventors, 500 strong innovators, and over 5,000 executives in 75 countries.
The results of the study is presented in Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators. The researchers learned innovators are not born. Instead, they are made. Innovators have learned to develop skills in five key areas:
- Questioning: Innovators have a passion for inquiry and learning. They frequently challenge the status quo by asking basic questions. They also as the question, “if we did this, what would happen?”
- Observing: Innovators are deep observers. They watch and observe trying to gain new ideas.
- Networking: Innovators spend gathering, sharing, and testing new ideas through a wide network of people with varying backgrounds.
- Experimenting: Innovators are continually piloting new ideas.
- Associating: Finally, innovators are able to make connections between seemingly unrelated ideas or problems, to develop breakthrough ideas.
Missing Strategy Ingredient?
Highlights provided by David Willden