The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators

Clay Christensen and Hal Gregersen

You really should take advantage of this exceptional gift from Harvard Business Review and be sure to tell your friends about it.

Here are the details.

COMPLIMENTARY LIVE AUDIO WEBINAR

Co-conductors: Clay Christensen and Hal Gregersen

Renowned innovation expert and HBS Professor, Clay Christensen, and Hal Gregersen, INSEAD Senior
Affiliate Professor, share secrets to cultivating innovation prowess throughout your organization

Wednesday, October 19, 2011
11:00 a.m. – 12:00 noon U.S./Canadian EST

Join us right from your office or conference room—by Internet link (no travel!)

About This Free, Interactive Webinar

Some people are natural innovators, right? They discover new products, services, and entire businesses with little effort, while the rest of us can’t keep up. Wrong.

Innovative capabilities are not innate, argues HBS professor Clay Christensen and INSEAD Professor Hal Gregersen and their co-author in The Innovator’s DNA. Anyone can master disruptive innovation by developing five skills:

1.  Associating: Drawing connections among questions, problems, or ideas from unrelated fields.
2. Questioning: Posing queries that challenge common wisdom.
3. Observing: Scrutinizing the behavior of customers, suppliers, and competitors to identify new ways of doing things.
4. Experimenting: Constructing interactive experiences and provoking unorthodox responses to see what insights emerge.
5. Networking: Mixing with people who have different ideas and perspectives.

In this interactive Harvard Business Review webinar on October 19, Professors Christensen and Gregersen will explain how you and your team can cultivate these skills to become more innovative.

Professors Christensen and Gregersen will share how to generate ideas using these skills, collaborate with “delivery-driven” colleagues to implement ideas, and build innovation strength throughout an organization. Attendees will learn to rate their own “Innovator’s DNA.”

Having coined the term and the concept “disruptive innovation,” Professor Christensen is a world-renowned expert on innovation. Gather your team on October 19 to hear Professors Christensen and Gregersen detail how your company can use his insights to your advantage. No team seeking to develop its innovation prowess should skip this opportunity.

After the event, you will receive a Key Learnings Summary, which captures the key insights from the event.

To register, please click here.

Can’t make it? Click here for information.

The Five Habits of Highly Innovative Leaders

Bruce Upbin

Here’s an article written by Bruce Upbin for Forbes magazine.  To check out all the online resources, sign up for email alerts, and obtain subscriptions information, please click here.

*     *     *

We’re proud to be publishing the first appearance of the World’s 100 Most Innovative Companies, a ranking that we hope to make an annual (maybe even quarterly) event highlighting the companies that investors believe to be the best at achieving consistent and profitable innovation. You can see the complete list here, and the gallery attached above covers advice from CEOs and leaders of companies on the list.

The list and its methodology is the result of years of research on corporate innovation, encapsulated in the new book, The Innovators DNA, by professors Clayton Christensen (Harvard Business School), Jeffrey Dyer (Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University) and Hal Gregersen (INSEAD). They, in turn, relied on proprietary financial analysis done by Michael McConnell and his team at HOLT, a division of Credit Suisse. Click here to see a video chat I had with Profs. Dyer and Gregersen talking about their research:

The great insight from their work is that innovation is well within the reach of mere mortals not named Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos. Successful innovation requires the right culture but new or incumbent leaders frustrated with a slow pace of innovation can start making change happen by behaving differently. It takes work, and may require some retraining, but the authors’ point is that anyone can innovate if they follow the five skills of disruptive innovators. They are:

o Questioning, which allows innovators to challenge the status quo and consider new possibilities. Example: Howard Schultz of Starbucks and Pradeep Sindhu of Juniper Networks

o Observing, which helps innovators detect small behavioral details –in the activities of customers, suppliers, and other companies – that suggest new ways of doing things. Examples: Rakesh Kapoor of Reckitt Benckiser and Jean-Paul Agon of L’Oreal

o Networking, which permits innovators to gain radically different perspectives from individuals with diverse backgrounds. Example: Marc Benioff of Salesforce. See Victoria Barret’s take on Benioff here.

o Experimenting, which prompts innovators to relentlessly try out new experiences, take things apart, and test new ideas. Example: Bobby Kotick from Activision Blizzard.

o Associational Thinking— drawing connections between questions, problems, or ideas from unrelated fields—is triggered by questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting and is the catalyst for creativity. Example: Natura Cosmeticos, the “Avon of Brazil,” which uses such cross-disciplinary teams to dream up new personal care products.

There’s a lot more to our package around the Most Innovative Companies list, including an overview of the methodology and research on Tom Post’s contributor page, a video interview between Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard and Juniper CEO Kevin Johnson. We’ll have a lot more profiles and videos with companies on the list over the next few months.

*     *     *

In Bruce’s own words:

“I’m a managing editor at Forbes. I started as a reporter here in 1995 and worked as Midwest bureau chief and tech/health editor. Current opportunity is extending and improving our technology coverage and big franchise lists on Web, print and mobile. I’m blessed with an amazingly talented team of journalists, developers and statisticians. I do not kite-surf or glacier but you can follow me on Twitter.”

How do innovators think?

Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and A.G. Lafley

What makes visionary entrepreneurs such as Apple’s Steve Jobs, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and P&G’s A.G. Lafley tick? In a question-and-answer session with Harvard Business Review contributing editor Bronwyn Fryer, professors Jeff Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of the international business school INSEAD, explain how the “Innovators’ DNA” works.

Fryer: You conducted a six-year study surveying 3,000 creative executives and conducting an additional 500 individual interviews. During this study you found five “discovery skills” that distinguish them. What are these skills?

Dyer: The first skill is what we call “associating.” It allows creative people to make connections across seemingly unrelated questions, problems or ideas. The second skill is “questioning”—an ability to ask “what if,” “why” and “why not” questions that challenge the status quo and open up the bigger picture. The third is the ability to closely observe details, particularly of people’s behavior. Another skill is the ability to experiment. And finally, they are really good at networking with smart people who have little in common with them, but from whom they can learn.

Which of these skills do you think is the most important?

Dyer: Overall, associating is the key skill because new ideas aren’t created without connecting problems or ideas in ways they haven’t been before. The other behaviors are inputs that trigger associating.

Gregersen: You might summarize all of the skills we’ve noted in one word: “inquisitiveness.” I spent 20 years studying great global leaders, and that was the big common denominator.

* * *

To read the complete interview, check out other articles and resources, and sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.