Worldview of the “front-end” of innovation: people, ideas and systems driving innovation

About the Study

Primary purpose was to uncover the origins of innovative – and often disruptive – business ideas.

8-year collaborative study of disruptive innovators

Hundreds of Inventors, Founders and CEOs of innovative companies

Innovative companies defined as those having an “innovation premium” where a company’s market value cannot be accounted from cash flows of its current products or businesses in its current markets.

Study focused on individual creativity as opposed to company strategy

Pattern of behaviors emerged/Discovery Quotient

What is this study important?

Innovator skills are portable. They matter as much for management, intrapreneurship and entrepreneurship : 90 – 8 – 2 “rule”

It will stimulate your creativity and inquisitiveness

It will assist you to generate better ideas

It will give you a competitive advantage

What’s Your Innovator Profile?

The ability to generate

innovative ideas is not merely a function of the

mind, but also a function of the exercise of

behavioral skills.

Discovery Skills Delivery Skills

Questioning** Analyzing

Observing** Planning

Networking** Detail-oriented implementing

Experimenting** Disciplined executing

Associating

** behaviors that generate the data and insights that fuel associative thinking

BusinessStage

DiscoverySkills

Delivery Skills

Startup

Growth

Maturity

Decline

"You don't invent the answers, you reveal the answers by finding the right questions.“- Jonas Salk

“The important and difficult job is never to find the right answers, it is to find the right questions. For there are few things as useless – if not dangerous – as the right answer to the wrong question.”- Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management

QuestioningInnovators ask 1) more questions and 2) more provocative questions than non-innovators

Questions that describe the territory explore what currently is/what caused.

Questions alone do not produce innovations

Questions that disrupt the territory use “why?”, “why not?” and most importantly “what if?”

“What if?” questions are especially important. By Imposing/Removing constraints forces out-of-the-box thinking because it ignites new associations.

Questioning

Combine questioning with other discovery skill behaviours (observing, networking and experimenting).

Tips:• Engage in QuestionStorming• Cultivate question thinking• Track your Q/A ratio• Keep a question-centered notebook

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." - Marcel Proust

Familiarity, habits and routine dull our observation skills

Observing

Vuja de – a sense of seeing something for the first time even though you have seen it many times before.

IDEO – “Pretend to be an anthropologist”

Pay attention to “workarounds” as a source of innovation opportunity/Look for surprises

Understand all dimensions of “getting the job done” – functional, social and emotional

Change your environment/Be open and patient/Engage your senses

Networking

Innovators go out of their way to meet people with different perspectives.

Innovators are idea networkers whereas non-innovators (delivery) are resource networkers

2/3 of jobs are known through private channels/some of the most valuable insights are locked-in these channels

Understand network topology /hubs and links

Know the most people; know the right people; know the most people who know the right people

Networking

Understand value networking versus utility networking

Attitude matters: What can this person do for me? (utility) vs How can I help this person in some way? (value)

Networking is not “working a room”

Prepare for networking/social media tools such as Twitter and Linkedin can be very useful

Source: http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/network

Source: http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/network

Source: http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/network

“The core skill of an innovator is error recovery, not failure avoidance.” - Randy Nelson, Dean of Pixar University

Experimenting

Other discovery skills yield information about the past/present but experimenting tells you something about the future.

Experimenting is seen as the best differentiator between an innovator and a non-innovator

Experiments rarely turn out as expected/significant learning opportunity

Virtually every disruptive business evolved through a series of experiments (Google)

Experimenting

Experiments can be costly investments of time/money; maximize your other discovery skills to reduce # of/raise quality of experiments

Practical tips for experimenting:• Take things apart (physically/figuratively)• Try new experiences/develop new skills• Test new ideas or prototypes

Well-designed experiments should validate/invalidate closely-held assumptions about the way things work

To design something really well you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to thoroughly understand something – chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that. Creativity is just connecting things. - Steve Jobs

Associational thinking is not the same thing as pattern recognition

Associating

Unlike the other four discovery skills, associating is a cognitive not a behavioural skill

The best predictor of associating skills was how often people engaged in the other four discovery skills

Output of other four discovery skills feed the potential for creative associations

Associating

Tips for developing your associating skills:• Zooming in and zooming out (from pixel to big picture)• Lego thinking (think of ideas as building blocks that can be

recombined in novel configurations)• Force new associations• Take on the persona of a different company• Generate metaphors• Build your own curiosity box (IDEO); Notebooks

What makes a good idea “good”?

“The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” - Linus Pauling

“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.” - Richard Buckminster

2 common mistakes: Implementing a bad idea and failing to act on a good one

It’s not enough to come up with an idea for innovation, you also require the capacity to actually implement it

The actual implemented solution rarely resembles the idea that hatched it.

Stay in touch:

@LucLalande

http://ca.linkedin.com/in/luclalande