Description
Is there a status quo in your work life that you think could be changed? In this Discussion, you will cultivate some of the important skills needed to challenge the existing state of affairs in your work life. Start by looking around your current workplace or envision the workplace at an organization with which you are familiar and start thinking, “What if?”
With these thoughts in mind:
Prepare the following:
- Ten questions that challenge the status quo at your current workplace, or one with which you are familiar. Be sure to place this list at the beginning of your Discussion post.
- Then, select one question for further analysis and provide a rationale as to why this question is important, why it poses a barrier to innovation, and why it challenges the status quo of the organization.
- Finally, select one of the five discovery skills from Dyer, et al. (2009), and provide a rationale for why this discovery skill would enable you or the organization to drive innovation and overcome creativity barriers and the status quo that prompted your question in the first place.
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SPOTLIGHT ON INNOVATION
Five “discovery skills” separate
true innovators from the
rest of us.
The Innovator’s DNA
by Jeffrey H. Dyer, Hal B. Gregersen, and
Clayton M. Christensen
•
Included with this full-text Harvard Business Review article:
1 Article Summary
The Idea in Brief—the core idea
2 The Innovator’s DNA
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SPOTLIGHT ON INNOVATION
The Innovator’s DNA
The Idea in Brief
The habits of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and
other innovative CEOs reveal much about
the underpinnings of their creative thinking. Research shows that five discovery
skills distinguish the most innovative
entrepreneurs from other executives.
DOING
• Questioning allows innovators to break
out of the status quo and consider new
possibilities.
• Through observing, innovators detect
small behavioral details—in the
activities of customers, suppliers, and
other companies—that suggest new
ways of doing things.
• In experimenting, they relentlessly try on
new experiences and explore the world.
• And through networking with individuals
from diverse backgrounds, they gain radically different perspectives.
COPYRIGHT © 2009 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
THINKING
• The four patterns of action together help
innovators associate to cultivate new
insights.
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Five “discovery skills” separate true innovators from the rest of us.
SPOTLIGHT ON INNOVATION
The Innovator’s DNA
COPYRIGHT © 2009 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
by Jeffrey H. Dyer, Hal B. Gregersen, and
Clayton M. Christensen
“How do I find innovative people for my
organization? And how can I become more
innovative myself?”
These are questions that stump senior executives, who understand that the ability to
innovate is the “secret sauce” of business
success. Unfortunately, most of us know very
little about what makes one person more creative than another. Perhaps for this reason,
we stand in awe of visionary entrepreneurs
like Apple’s Steve Jobs, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos,
eBay’s Pierre Omidyar, and P&G’s A.G. Lafley.
How do these people come up with groundbreaking new ideas? If it were possible to
discover the inner workings of the masters’
minds, what could the rest of us learn about
how innovation really happens?
In searching for answers, we undertook a sixyear study to uncover the origins of creative—
and often disruptive—business strategies in
particularly innovative companies. Our goal
was to put innovative entrepreneurs under
the microscope, examining when and how
they came up with the ideas on which their
harvard business review • december 2009
businesses were built. We especially wanted to
examine how they differ from other executives
and entrepreneurs: Someone who buys a
McDonald’s franchise may be an entrepreneur,
but building an Amazon requires different
skills altogether. We studied the habits of 25
innovative entrepreneurs and surveyed more
than 3,000 executives and 500 individuals who
had started innovative companies or invented
new products.
We were intrigued to learn that at most
companies, top executives do not feel personally responsible for coming up with strategic
innovations. Rather, they feel responsible for
facilitating the innovation process. In stark
contrast, senior executives of the most innovative companies—a mere 15% in our study—
don’t delegate creative work. They do it
themselves.
But how do they do it? Our research led us
to identify five “discovery skills” that distinguish the most creative executives: associating, questioning, observing, experimenting,
and networking. We found that innovative
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The Innovator’s DNA •• •S POTLIGHT ON I NNOVATION
entrepreneurs (who are also CEOs) spend 50%
more time on these discovery activities than
do CEOs with no track record for innovation.
Together, these skills make up what we call
the innovator’s DNA. And the good news is, if
you’re not born with it, you can cultivate it.
What Makes Innovators Different?
Jeffrey H. Dyer (jdyer@byu.edu) is
a professor of strategy at Brigham
Young University in Provo, Utah, and
an adjunct professor at the University
of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
Hal B. Gregersen (hal.gregersen@
insead.edu) is a professor of
leadership at Insead in Abu Dhabi,
UAE, and Fontainebleau, France.
Clayton M. Christensen
(cchristensen@hbs.edu) is a professor
of business administration at Harvard
Business School in Boston.
Innovative entrepreneurs have something
called creative intelligence, which enables
discovery yet differs from other types of intelligence (as suggested by Howard Gardner’s
theory of multiple intelligences). It is more
than the cognitive skill of being right-brained.
Innovators engage both sides of the brain as
they leverage the five discovery skills to create
new ideas.
In thinking about how these skills work
together, we’ve found it useful to apply the
metaphor of DNA. Associating is like the
backbone structure of DNA’s double helix;
four patterns of action (questioning, observing, experimenting, and networking) wind
around this backbone, helping to cultivate
new insights. And just as each person’s physical DNA is unique, each individual we studied
had a unique innovator’s DNA for generating
breakthrough business ideas.
Imagine that you have an identical twin,
endowed with the same brains and natural
talents that you have. You’re both given
one week to come up with a creative new
business-venture idea. During that week, you
come up with ideas alone in your room. In
contrast, your twin (1) talks with 10 people—
including an engineer, a musician, a stayat-home dad, and a designer—about the venture, (2) visits three innovative start-ups to
observe what they do, (3) samples five “new to
the market” products, (4) shows a prototype
he’s built to five people, and (5) asks the questions “What if I tried this?” and “Why do you
do that?” at least 10 times each day during
these networking, observing, and experimenting activities. Who do you bet will come up
with the more innovative (and doable) idea?
Studies of identical twins separated at birth
indicate that our ability to think creatively
comes one-third from genetics; but two-thirds
of the innovation skill set comes through
learning—first understanding a given skill,
then practicing it, experimenting, and ultimately gaining confidence in one’s capacity to
create. Innovative entrepreneurs in our study
harvard business review • december 2009
acquired and honed their innovation skills
precisely this way.
Let’s look at the skills in detail.
Discovery Skill 1: Associating
Associating, or the ability to successfully connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems,
or ideas from different fields, is central to
the innovator’s DNA. Entrepreneur Frans
Johansson described this phenomenon as
the “Medici effect,” referring to the creative
explosion in Florence when the Medici family
brought together people from a wide range
of disciplines—sculptors, scientists, poets, philosophers, painters, and architects. As these
individuals connected, new ideas blossomed
at the intersections of their respective fields,
thereby spawning the Renaissance, one of the
most inventive eras in history.
To grasp how associating works, it is important to understand how the brain operates.
The brain doesn’t store information like a
dictionary, where you can find the word
“theater” under the letter “T.” Instead, it associates the word “theater” with any number of
experiences from our lives. Some of these are
logical (“West End” or “intermission”), while
others may be less obvious (perhaps “anxiety,”
from a botched performance in high school).
The more diverse our experience and knowledge, the more connections the brain can
make. Fresh inputs trigger new associations;
for some, these lead to novel ideas. As Steve
Jobs has frequently observed, “Creativity is
connecting things.”
The world’s most innovative companies
prosper by capitalizing on the divergent associations of their founders, executives, and
employees. For example, Pierre Omidyar
launched eBay in 1996 after linking three unconnected dots: (1) a fascination with creating
more-efficient markets, after having been
shut out from a hot internet company’s IPO
in the mid-1990s; (2) his fiancée’s desire to
locate hard-to-find collectible Pez dispensers;
and (3) the ineffectiveness of local classified
ads in locating such items. Likewise, Steve
Jobs is able to generate idea after idea because he has spent a lifetime exploring new
and unrelated things—the art of calligraphy,
meditation practices in an Indian ashram, the
fine details of a Mercedes-Benz.
Associating is like a mental muscle that can
grow stronger by using the other discovery
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The Innovator’s DNA •• •S POTLIGHT ON I NNOVATION
skills. As innovators engage in those behaviors,
they build their ability to generate ideas that
can be recombined in new ways. The more
frequently people in our study attempted
to understand, categorize, and store new
knowledge, the more easily their brains could
naturally and consistently make, store, and
recombine associations.
Discovery Skill 2: Questioning
Sample of Innovative
Entrepreneurs from
our Study
Sam Allen: ScanCafe.com
Marc Benioff: Salesforce.com
Jeff Bezos: Amazon.com
Mike Collins: Big Idea Group
Scott Cook: Intuit
Michael Dell: Dell Computer
Aaron Garrity: XanGo
Diane Green: VMWare
Eliot Jacobsen: RocketFuel
Josh James: Omniture
Chris Johnson: Terra Nova
Jeff Jones: NxLight; Campus Pipeline
Herb Kelleher: Southwest Airlines
Mike Lazaridis: Research In Motion
Spencer Moffat: Fast Arch of Utah
David Neeleman: JetBlue; Morris Air
Pierre Omidyar: eBay
John Pestana: Omniture
Peter Thiel: PayPal
Mark Wattles: Hollywood Video
Corey Wride: Movie Mouth
Niklas Zennström: Skype
More than 50 years ago, Peter Drucker described the power of provocative questions.
“The important and difficult job is never to
find the right answers, it is to find the right
question,” he wrote. Innovators constantly
ask questions that challenge common wisdom
or, as Tata Group chairman Ratan Tata puts
it, “question the unquestionable.” Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay, has worked directly
with a number of innovative entrepreneurs,
including the founders of eBay, PayPal, and
Skype. “They get a kick out of screwing up the
status quo,” she told us. “They can’t bear it.
So they spend a tremendous amount of time
thinking about how to change the world. And
as they brainstorm, they like to ask: ‘If we did
this, what would happen?’”
Most of the innovative entrepreneurs
we interviewed could remember the specific
questions they were asking at the time
they had the inspiration for a new venture.
Michael Dell, for instance, told us that his
idea for founding Dell Computer sprang from
his asking why a computer cost five times
as much as the sum of its parts. “I would
take computers apart…and would observe
that $600 worth of parts were sold for
$3,000.” In chewing over the question, he
hit on his revolutionary business model.
To question effectively, innovative entrepreneurs do the following:
Ask “Why?” and “Why not?” and “What if?”
Most managers focus on understanding how
to make existing processes—the status quo—
work a little better (“How can we improve
widget sales in Taiwan?”). Innovative entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are much more
likely to challenge assumptions (“If we cut the
size or weight of the widget in half, how would
that change the value proposition it offers?”).
Marc Benioff, the founder of the online sales
software provider Salesforce.com, was full of
questions after witnessing the emergence of
Amazon and eBay, two companies built on
harvard business review • december 2009
services delivered via the internet. “Why are
we still loading and upgrading software the
way we’ve been doing all this time when
we can now do it over the internet?” he
wondered. This fundamental question was the
genesis of Salesforce.com.
Imagine opposites. In his book The Opposable Mind, Roger Martin writes that innovative thinkers have “the capacity to hold two
diametrically opposing ideas in their heads.”
He explains, “Without panicking or simply
settling for one alternative or the other,
they’re able to produce a synthesis that is
superior to either opposing idea.”
Innovative entrepreneurs like to play devil’s
advocate. “My learning process has always
been about disagreeing with what I’m being
told and taking the opposite position, and
pushing others to really justify themselves,”
Pierre Omidyar told us. “I remember it was
very frustrating for the other kids when I
would do this.” Asking oneself, or others, to
imagine a completely different alternative
can lead to truly original insights.
Embrace constraints. Most of us impose
constraints on our thinking only when forced
to deal with real-world limitations, such as resource allocations or technology restrictions.
Ironically, great questions actively impose
constraints on our thinking and serve as a
catalyst for out-of-the-box insights. (In fact,
one of Google’s nine innovation principles is
“Creativity loves constraint.”) To initiate a
creative discussion about growth opportunities, one innovative executive in our study
asked this question: “What if we were legally
prohibited from selling to our current customers? How would we make money next year?”
This led to an insightful exploration of ways
the company could find and serve new customers. Another innovative CEO prods his
managers to examine sunk-cost constraints
by asking, “What if you had not already hired
this person, installed this equipment, implemented this process, bought this business, or
pursued this strategy? Would you do the same
thing you are doing today?”
Discovery Skill 3: Observing
Discovery-driven executives produce uncommon business ideas by scrutinizing common
phenomena, particularly the behavior of
potential customers. In observing others, they
act like anthropologists and social scientists.
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The Innovator’s DNA •• •S POTLIGHT ON I NNOVATION
Intuit founder Scott Cook hit on the idea
for Quicken financial software after two key
observations. First he watched his wife’s
frustration as she struggled to keep track of
their finances. “Often the surprises that lead
to new business ideas come from watching
other people work and live their normal
lives,” Cook explained. “You see something
and ask, ‘Why do they do that? That doesn’t
make sense.’” Then a buddy got him a sneak
peek at the Apple Lisa before it launched. Immediately after leaving Apple headquarters,
Cook drove to the nearest restaurant to write
down everything he had noticed about the
Lisa. His observations prompted insights
such as building the graphical user interface
to look just like its real-world counterpart
(a checkbook, for example), making it easy
for people to use it. So Cook set about solving
his wife’s problem and grabbed 50% of the
market for financial software in the first year.
Innovators carefully, intentionally, and
consistently look out for small behavioral
details—in the activities of customers, suppliers, and other companies—in order to gain
insights about new ways of doing things.
Ratan Tata got the inspiration that led to the
world’s cheapest car by observing the plight
of a family of four packed onto a single motorized scooter. After years of product development, Tata Group launched in 2009 the
$2,500 Nano using a modular production
method that may disrupt the entire automobile distribution system in India. Observers
try all sorts of techniques to see the world in
a different light. Akio Toyoda regularly practices Toyota’s philosophy of genchi genbutsu—
“going to the spot and seeing for yourself.”
Frequent direct observation is baked into the
Toyota culture.
Discovery Skill 4: Experimenting
When we think of experiments, we think of
scientists in white coats or of great inventors
like Thomas Edison. Like scientists, innovative
entrepreneurs actively try out new ideas by
creating prototypes and launching pilots.
(As Edison said, “I haven’t failed. I’ve simply
found 10,000 ways that do not work.”) The
world is their laboratory. Unlike observers,
who intensely watch the world, experimenters
construct interactive experiences and try to
How Innovators Stack Up
This chart shows how four well-known innovative entrepreneurs rank on each of the discovery skills. All our high-profile innovators scored above the 80th percentile on questioning, yet each combined the discovery skills uniquely to forge new insights.
ASSOCIATING
100
QUESTIONING
OBSERVING
EXPERIMENTING
NETWORKING
Michael Dell
Michael Lazaridis
80
Pierre Omidyar
60
Scott Cook
Noninnovators
40
PERCENTILE
Rankings are based on a survey of more than 3,000 executives and entrepreneurs.
harvard business review • december 2009
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The Innovator’s DNA •• •S POTLIGHT ON I NNOVATION
provoke unorthodox responses to see what
insights emerge.
The innovative entrepreneurs we interviewed all engaged in some form of active
experimentation, whether it was intellectual
exploration (Michael Lazaridis mulling over
the theory of relativity in high school), physical tinkering (Jeff Bezos taking apart his
crib as a toddler or Steve Jobs disassembling
a Sony Walkman), or engagement in new surroundings (Starbucks founder Howard Shultz
roaming Italy visiting coffee bars). As executives of innovative enterprises, they make
experimentation central to everything they
do. Bezos’s online bookstore didn’t stay where
it was after its initial success; it morphed
into an online discount retailer, selling a full
line of products from toys to TVs to home
appliances. The electronic reader Kindle is an
experiment that is now transforming Amazon
from an online retailer to an innovative
electronics manufacturer. Bezos sees experimentation as so critical to innovation that
he has institutionalized it at Amazon. “I encourage our employees to go down blind
alleys and experiment,” Bezos says. “If we can
get processes decentralized so that we can do
a lot of experiments without it being very
costly, we’ll get a lot more innovation.”
Scott Cook, too, stresses the importance of
creating a culture that fosters experimentation. “Our culture opens us to allowing lots
of failures while harvesting the learning,”
he told us. “It’s what separates an innovation
culture from a normal corporate culture.”
One of the most powerful experiments innovators can engage in is living and working
overseas. Our research revealed that the more
countries a person has lived in, the more
likely he or she is to leverage that experience
to deliver innovative products, processes,
or businesses. In fact, if managers try out
even one international assignment before
becoming CEO, their companies deliver stronger financial results than companies run
by CEOs without such experience—roughly
7% higher market performance on average,
according to research by Gregersen, Mason A.
Carpenter, and Gerard W. Sanders. P&G’s
A.G. Lafley, for example, spent time as a
student studying history in France and
running retail operations on U.S. military
bases in Japan. He returned to Japan later
to head all of P&G’s Asia operations before
harvard business review • december 2009
becoming CEO. His diverse international experience has served him well as the leader
of one of the most innovative companies in
the world.
Discovery Skill 5: Networking
Devoting time and energy to finding and
testing ideas through a network of diverse
individuals gives innovators a radically different perspective. Unlike most executives—who
network to access resources, to sell themselves
or their companies, or to boost their careers—
innovative entrepreneurs go out of their way
to meet people with different kinds of ideas
and perspectives to extend their own knowledge domains. To this end, they make a conscious effort to visit other countries and
meet people from other walks of life.
They also attend idea conferences such as
Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED),
Davos, and the Aspen Ideas Festival. Such conferences draw together artists, entrepreneurs,
academics, politicians, adventurers, scientists,
and thinkers from all over the world, who
come to present their newest ideas, passions,
and projects. Michael Lazaridis, the founder of
Research In Motion, notes that the inspiration
for the original BlackBerry occurred at a
conference in 1987. A speaker was describing a
wireless data system that had been designed
for Coke; it allowed vending machines to
send a signal when they needed refilling.
“That’s when it hit me,” Lazaridis recalls.
“I remembered what my teacher said in high
school: ‘Don’t get too caught up with computers because the person that puts wireless
technology and computers together is going to
make a big difference.’” David Neeleman came
up with key ideas for JetBlue—such as satellite
TV at every seat and at-home reservationists—
through networking at conferences and
elsewhere.
Kent Bowen, the founding scientist of CPS
technologies (maker of an innovative ceramic
composite), hung the following credo in every
office of his start-up: “The insights required to
solve many of our most challenging problems
come from outside our industry and scientific
field. We must aggressively and proudly incorporate into our work findings and advances
which were not invented here.” Scientists
from CPS have solved numerous complex
problems by talking with people in other
fields. One expert from Polaroid with in-depth
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The Innovator’s DNA •• •S POTLIGHT ON I NNOVATION
knowledge of film technology knew how to
make the ceramic composite stronger. Experts
in sperm-freezing technology knew how to
prevent ice crystal growth on cells during
freezing, a technique that CPS applied to its
manufacturing process with stunning success.
Practice, Practice, Practice
As innovators actively engage in the discovery
skills, they become defined by them. They
grow increasingly confident of their creative
abilities. For A.G. Lafley, innovation is the
central job of every leader, regardless of the
place he or she occupies on the organizational
chart. But what if you—like most executives—
don’t see yourself or those on your team as
particularly innovative?
Though innovative thinking may be innate
to some, it can also be developed and strengthened through practice. We cannot emphasize
enough the importance of rehearsing over
and over the behaviors described above, to the
point that they become automatic. This requires putting aside time for you and your
team to actively cultivate more creative ideas.
The most important skill to practice is
questioning. Asking “Why” and “Why not”
can help turbocharge the other discovery skills.
Ask questions that both impose and eliminate
constraints; this will help you see a problem
or opportunity from a different angle. Try
Put a Ding in the Universe
Why do innovators question, observe,
experiment, and network more than
typical executives? As we examined what
motivates them, we discovered two common themes: (1) They actively desire to
change the status quo, and (2) they
regularly take risks to make that change
happen. Throughout our research, we
were struck by the consistency of
language that innovators use to describe
their motives. Jeff Bezos wants to “make
history,” Steve Jobs to “put a ding in the
universe,” Skype cofounder Niklas
Zennström to “be disruptive, but in
the cause of making the world a better
place.” These innovators steer entirely
clear of a common cognitive bias called
the status quo bias—the tendency to
harvard business review • december 2009
prefer an existing state of affairs to
alternative ones.
Embracing a mission for change
makes it much easier to take risks and
make mistakes. For most of the innovative entrepreneurs we studied, mistakes
are nothing to be ashamed of; in fact,
they are expected as a cost of doing business. “If the people running Amazon.com
don’t make some significant mistakes,”
explained Bezos, “then we won’t be doing
a good job for our shareholders because
we won’t be swinging for the fences.” In
short, innovators rely on their “courage
to innovate”—an active bias against the
status quo and an unflinching willingness
to take risks—to transform ideas into
powerful impact.
spending 15 to 30 minutes each day writing
down 10 new questions that challenge the
status quo in your company or industry.
“If I had a favorite question to ask, everyone
would anticipate it,” Michael Dell told us. “Instead I like to ask things people don’t think
I’m going to ask. This is a little cruel, but I
kind of delight in coming up with questions
that nobody has the answer to quite yet.”
To sharpen your own observational skills,
watch how certain customers experience a
product or service in their natural environment. Spend an entire day carefully observing
the “jobs” that customers are trying to get
done. Try not to make judgments about what
you see: Simply pretend you’re a fly on the
wall, and observe as neutrally as possible.
Scott Cook advises Intuit’s observers to ask,
“What’s different than you expected?” Follow
Richard Branson’s example and get in the
habit of note taking wherever you go. Or
follow Jeff Bezos’s: “I take pictures of really
bad innovations,” he told us, “of which there
are a number.”
To strengthen experimentation, at both
the individual and organizational levels,
consciously approach work and life with a
hypothesis-testing mind-set. Attend seminars
or executive education courses on topics outside your area of expertise; take apart a product or process that interests you; read books
that purport to identify emerging trends.
When you travel, don’t squander the opportunity to learn about different lifestyles and
local behavior. Develop new hypotheses from
the knowledge you’ve acquired and test them
in the search for new products or processes.
Find ways to institutionalize frequent, small
experiments at all levels of the organization.
Openly acknowledging that learning through
failure is valuable goes a long way toward
building an innovative culture.
To improve your networking skills, contact
the five most creative people you know and
ask them to share what they do to stimulate
creative thinking. You might also ask if they’d
be willing to act as your creative mentors. We
suggest holding regular idea lunches at which
you meet a few new people from diverse
functions, companies, industries, or countries.
Get them to tell you about their innovative
ideas and ask for feedback on yours.
•••
Innovative entrepreneurship is not a genetic
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The Innovator’s DNA •• •S POTLIGHT ON I NNOVATION
predisposition, it is an active endeavor. Apple’s
slogan “Think Different” is inspiring but incomplete. We found that innovators must consistently act different to think different. By understanding, reinforcing, and modeling the
innovator’s DNA, companies can find ways to
more successfully develop the creative spark
in everyone.
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Further Reading
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www.hbr.org
Your organization could use a
bigger dose of creativity.
Here’s what to do about it.
Creativity and the Role
of the Leader
by Teresa M. Amabile and Mukti Khaire
Included with this full-text Harvard Business Review article:
1 Article Summary
The Idea in Brief—the core idea
The Idea in Practice—putting the idea to work
2 Creativity and the Role of the Leader
11 Further Reading
A list of related materials, with annotations to guide further
exploration of the article’s ideas and applications
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Creativity and the Role of the Leader
The Idea in Brief
The Idea in Practice
In today’s innovation-driven economy,
understanding how to generate great ideas
is an urgent managerial priority. And that
calls for major doses of creativity. But many
leaders assume creativity is too elusive and
intangible to be managed.
To enhance organizational creativity, consider these practices:
It’s true that you can’t manage creativity.
But you can manage for creativity, say
innovation leaders and experts who participated in a 2008 Harvard Business School
colloquium. Among their recommendations for fostering the conditions in which
creativity flourishes:
• Stop thinking of yourself as the wellspring of ideas that employees execute.
Instead, elicit and champion others’
ideas.
COPYRIGHT © 2008 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
• Open your organization to diverse
perspectives—by getting people of
different disciplines, backgrounds, and
areas of expertise to share their thinking.
• Know when to impose controls on the
creative process (such as during the
commercialization phase) and when not
to (during early-idea generation).
TAP IDEAS FROM ALL RANKS
PROTECT CREATIVES FROM BUREAUCRACY
Elicit ideas from people throughout your organization. Google’s founders Sergey Brin and
Larry Page tracked the progress of ideas that
came from them versus ideas that bubbled
up from the ranks—and discovered a higher
success rate in the latter category.
As a fresh idea travels through an organization
toward commercialization, powerful constituencies often beat it into a shape that conforms
to the existing model. Protect those doing
creative work from this hostile environment
by clearing paths for them around obstacles.
Motivate people to contribute ideas by
making it safe to fail. Stress that the goal is to
experiment constantly, fail early and often—
and learn as much as possible in the process.
Convince people that they won’t be punished
or humiliated if they speak up or make
mistakes.
Further engage people by being an appreciative audience. Asking questions about a
project and providing even a word of sincere
recognition can be more motivating than
money.
OPEN YOUR COMPANY TO DIVERSE
SPOTLIGHT ON INNOVATION
Five “discovery skills” separate
true innovators from the
rest of us.
The Innovator’s DNA
by Jeffrey H. Dyer, Hal B. Gregersen, and
Clayton M. Christensen
•
Included with this full-text Harvard Business Review article:
1 Article Summary
The Idea in Brief—the core idea
2 The Innovator’s DNA
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SPOTLIGHT ON INNOVATION
The Innovator’s DNA
The Idea in Brief
The habits of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and
other innovative CEOs reveal much about
the underpinnings of their creative thinking. Research shows that five discovery
skills distinguish the most innovative
entrepreneurs from other executives.
DOING
• Questioning allows innovators to break
out of the status quo and consider new
possibilities.
• Through observing, innovators detect
small behavioral details—in the
activities of customers, suppliers, and
other companies—that suggest new
ways of doing things.
• In experimenting, they relentlessly try on
new experiences and explore the world.
• And through networking with individuals
from diverse backgrounds, they gain radically different perspectives.
COPYRIGHT © 2009 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
THINKING
• The four patterns of action together help
innovators associate to cultivate new
insights.
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Five “discovery skills” separate true innovators from the rest of us.
SPOTLIGHT ON INNOVATION
The Innovator’s DNA
COPYRIGHT © 2009 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
by Jeffrey H. Dyer, Hal B. Gregersen, and
Clayton M. Christensen
“How do I find innovative people for my
organization? And how can I become more
innovative myself?”
These are questions that stump senior executives, who understand that the ability to
innovate is the “secret sauce” of business
success. Unfortunately, most of us know very
little about what makes one person more creative than another. Perhaps for this reason,
we stand in awe of visionary entrepreneurs
like Apple’s Steve Jobs, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos,
eBay’s Pierre Omidyar, and P&G’s A.G. Lafley.
How do these people come up with groundbreaking new ideas? If it were possible to
discover the inner workings of the masters’
minds, what could the rest of us learn about
how innovation really happens?
In searching for answers, we undertook a sixyear study to uncover the origins of creative—
and often disruptive—business strategies in
particularly innovative companies. Our goal
was to put innovative entrepreneurs under
the microscope, examining when and how
they came up with the ideas on which their
harvard business review • december 2009
businesses were built. We especially wanted to
examine how they differ from other executives
and entrepreneurs: Someone who buys a
McDonald’s franchise may be an entrepreneur,
but building an Amazon requires different
skills altogether. We studied the habits of 25
innovative entrepreneurs and surveyed more
than 3,000 executives and 500 individuals who
had started innovative companies or invented
new products.
We were intrigued to learn that at most
companies, top executives do not feel personally responsible for coming up with strategic
innovations. Rather, they feel responsible for
facilitating the innovation process. In stark
contrast, senior executives of the most innovative companies—a mere 15% in our study—
don’t delegate creative work. They do it
themselves.
But how do they do it? Our research led us
to identify five “discovery skills” that distinguish the most creative executives: associating, questioning, observing, experimenting,
and networking. We found that innovative
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The Innovator’s DNA •• •S POTLIGHT ON I NNOVATION
entrepreneurs (who are also CEOs) spend 50%
more time on these discovery activities than
do CEOs with no track record for innovation.
Together, these skills make up what we call
the innovator’s DNA. And the good news is, if
you’re not born with it, you can cultivate it.
What Makes Innovators Different?
Jeffrey H. Dyer (jdyer@byu.edu) is
a professor of strategy at Brigham
Young University in Provo, Utah, and
an adjunct professor at the University
of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
Hal B. Gregersen (hal.gregersen@
insead.edu) is a professor of
leadership at Insead in Abu Dhabi,
UAE, and Fontainebleau, France.
Clayton M. Christensen
(cchristensen@hbs.edu) is a professor
of business administration at Harvard
Business School in Boston.
Innovative entrepreneurs have something
called creative intelligence, which enables
discovery yet differs from other types of intelligence (as suggested by Howard Gardner’s
theory of multiple intelligences). It is more
than the cognitive skill of being right-brained.
Innovators engage both sides of the brain as
they leverage the five discovery skills to create
new ideas.
In thinking about how these skills work
together, we’ve found it useful to apply the
metaphor of DNA. Associating is like the
backbone structure of DNA’s double helix;
four patterns of action (questioning, observing, experimenting, and networking) wind
around this backbone, helping to cultivate
new insights. And just as each person’s physical DNA is unique, each individual we studied
had a unique innovator’s DNA for generating
breakthrough business ideas.
Imagine that you have an identical twin,
endowed with the same brains and natural
talents that you have. You’re both given
one week to come up with a creative new
business-venture idea. During that week, you
come up with ideas alone in your room. In
contrast, your twin (1) talks with 10 people—
including an engineer, a musician, a stayat-home dad, and a designer—about the venture, (2) visits three innovative start-ups to
observe what they do, (3) samples five “new to
the market” products, (4) shows a prototype
he’s built to five people, and (5) asks the questions “What if I tried this?” and “Why do you
do that?” at least 10 times each day during
these networking, observing, and experimenting activities. Who do you bet will come up
with the more innovative (and doable) idea?
Studies of identical twins separated at birth
indicate that our ability to think creatively
comes one-third from genetics; but two-thirds
of the innovation skill set comes through
learning—first understanding a given skill,
then practicing it, experimenting, and ultimately gaining confidence in one’s capacity to
create. Innovative entrepreneurs in our study
harvard business review • december 2009
acquired and honed their innovation skills
precisely this way.
Let’s look at the skills in detail.
Discovery Skill 1: Associating
Associating, or the ability to successfully connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems,
or ideas from different fields, is central to
the innovator’s DNA. Entrepreneur Frans
Johansson described this phenomenon as
the “Medici effect,” referring to the creative
explosion in Florence when the Medici family
brought together people from a wide range
of disciplines—sculptors, scientists, poets, philosophers, painters, and architects. As these
individuals connected, new ideas blossomed
at the intersections of their respective fields,
thereby spawning the Renaissance, one of the
most inventive eras in history.
To grasp how associating works, it is important to understand how the brain operates.
The brain doesn’t store information like a
dictionary, where you can find the word
“theater” under the letter “T.” Instead, it associates the word “theater” with any number of
experiences from our lives. Some of these are
logical (“West End” or “intermission”), while
others may be less obvious (perhaps “anxiety,”
from a botched performance in high school).
The more diverse our experience and knowledge, the more connections the brain can
make. Fresh inputs trigger new associations;
for some, these lead to novel ideas. As Steve
Jobs has frequently observed, “Creativity is
connecting things.”
The world’s most innovative companies
prosper by capitalizing on the divergent associations of their founders, executives, and
employees. For example, Pierre Omidyar
launched eBay in 1996 after linking three unconnected dots: (1) a fascination with creating
more-efficient markets, after having been
shut out from a hot internet company’s IPO
in the mid-1990s; (2) his fiancée’s desire to
locate hard-to-find collectible Pez dispensers;
and (3) the ineffectiveness of local classified
ads in locating such items. Likewise, Steve
Jobs is able to generate idea after idea because he has spent a lifetime exploring new
and unrelated things—the art of calligraphy,
meditation practices in an Indian ashram, the
fine details of a Mercedes-Benz.
Associating is like a mental muscle that can
grow stronger by using the other discovery
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The Innovator’s DNA •• •S POTLIGHT ON I NNOVATION
skills. As innovators engage in those behaviors,
they build their ability to generate ideas that
can be recombined in new ways. The more
frequently people in our study attempted
to understand, categorize, and store new
knowledge, the more easily their brains could
naturally and consistently make, store, and
recombine associations.
Discovery Skill 2: Questioning
Sample of Innovative
Entrepreneurs from
our Study
Sam Allen: ScanCafe.com
Marc Benioff: Salesforce.com
Jeff Bezos: Amazon.com
Mike Collins: Big Idea Group
Scott Cook: Intuit
Michael Dell: Dell Computer
Aaron Garrity: XanGo
Diane Green: VMWare
Eliot Jacobsen: RocketFuel
Josh James: Omniture
Chris Johnson: Terra Nova
Jeff Jones: NxLight; Campus Pipeline
Herb Kelleher: Southwest Airlines
Mike Lazaridis: Research In Motion
Spencer Moffat: Fast Arch of Utah
David Neeleman: JetBlue; Morris Air
Pierre Omidyar: eBay
John Pestana: Omniture
Peter Thiel: PayPal
Mark Wattles: Hollywood Video
Corey Wride: Movie Mouth
Niklas Zennström: Skype
More than 50 years ago, Peter Drucker described the power of provocative questions.
“The important and difficult job is never to
find the right answers, it is to find the right
question,” he wrote. Innovators constantly
ask questions that challenge common wisdom
or, as Tata Group chairman Ratan Tata puts
it, “question the unquestionable.” Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay, has worked directly
with a number of innovative entrepreneurs,
including the founders of eBay, PayPal, and
Skype. “They get a kick out of screwing up the
status quo,” she told us. “They can’t bear it.
So they spend a tremendous amount of time
thinking about how to change the world. And
as they brainstorm, they like to ask: ‘If we did
this, what would happen?’”
Most of the innovative entrepreneurs
we interviewed could remember the specific
questions they were asking at the time
they had the inspiration for a new venture.
Michael Dell, for instance, told us that his
idea for founding Dell Computer sprang from
his asking why a computer cost five times
as much as the sum of its parts. “I would
take computers apart…and would observe
that $600 worth of parts were sold for
$3,000.” In chewing over the question, he
hit on his revolutionary business model.
To question effectively, innovative entrepreneurs do the following:
Ask “Why?” and “Why not?” and “What if?”
Most managers focus on understanding how
to make existing processes—the status quo—
work a little better (“How can we improve
widget sales in Taiwan?”). Innovative entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are much more
likely to challenge assumptions (“If we cut the
size or weight of the widget in half, how would
that change the value proposition it offers?”).
Marc Benioff, the founder of the online sales
software provider Salesforce.com, was full of
questions after witnessing the emergence of
Amazon and eBay, two companies built on
harvard business review • december 2009
services delivered via the internet. “Why are
we still loading and upgrading software the
way we’ve been doing all this time when
we can now do it over the internet?” he
wondered. This fundamental question was the
genesis of Salesforce.com.
Imagine opposites. In his book The Opposable Mind, Roger Martin writes that innovative thinkers have “the capacity to hold two
diametrically opposing ideas in their heads.”
He explains, “Without panicking or simply
settling for one alternative or the other,
they’re able to produce a synthesis that is
superior to either opposing idea.”
Innovative entrepreneurs like to play devil’s
advocate. “My learning process has always
been about disagreeing with what I’m being
told and taking the opposite position, and
pushing others to really justify themselves,”
Pierre Omidyar told us. “I remember it was
very frustrating for the other kids when I
would do this.” Asking oneself, or others, to
imagine a completely different alternative
can lead to truly original insights.
Embrace constraints. Most of us impose
constraints on our thinking only when forced
to deal with real-world limitations, such as resource allocations or technology restrictions.
Ironically, great questions actively impose
constraints on our thinking and serve as a
catalyst for out-of-the-box insights. (In fact,
one of Google’s nine innovation principles is
“Creativity loves constraint.”) To initiate a
creative discussion about growth opportunities, one innovative executive in our study
asked this question: “What if we were legally
prohibited from selling to our current customers? How would we make money next year?”
This led to an insightful exploration of ways
the company could find and serve new customers. Another innovative CEO prods his
managers to examine sunk-cost constraints
by asking, “What if you had not already hired
this person, installed this equipment, implemented this process, bought this business, or
pursued this strategy? Would you do the same
thing you are doing today?”
Discovery Skill 3: Observing
Discovery-driven executives produce uncommon business ideas by scrutinizing common
phenomena, particularly the behavior of
potential customers. In observing others, they
act like anthropologists and social scientists.
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The Innovator’s DNA •• •S POTLIGHT ON I NNOVATION
Intuit founder Scott Cook hit on the idea
for Quicken financial software after two key
observations. First he watched his wife’s
frustration as she struggled to keep track of
their finances. “Often the surprises that lead
to new business ideas come from watching
other people work and live their normal
lives,” Cook explained. “You see something
and ask, ‘Why do they do that? That doesn’t
make sense.’” Then a buddy got him a sneak
peek at the Apple Lisa before it launched. Immediately after leaving Apple headquarters,
Cook drove to the nearest restaurant to write
down everything he had noticed about the
Lisa. His observations prompted insights
such as building the graphical user interface
to look just like its real-world counterpart
(a checkbook, for example), making it easy
for people to use it. So Cook set about solving
his wife’s problem and grabbed 50% of the
market for financial software in the first year.
Innovators carefully, intentionally, and
consistently look out for small behavioral
details—in the activities of customers, suppliers, and other companies—in order to gain
insights about new ways of doing things.
Ratan Tata got the inspiration that led to the
world’s cheapest car by observing the plight
of a family of four packed onto a single motorized scooter. After years of product development, Tata Group launched in 2009 the
$2,500 Nano using a modular production
method that may disrupt the entire automobile distribution system in India. Observers
try all sorts of techniques to see the world in
a different light. Akio Toyoda regularly practices Toyota’s philosophy of genchi genbutsu—
“going to the spot and seeing for yourself.”
Frequent direct observation is baked into the
Toyota culture.
Discovery Skill 4: Experimenting
When we think of experiments, we think of
scientists in white coats or of great inventors
like Thomas Edison. Like scientists, innovative
entrepreneurs actively try out new ideas by
creating prototypes and launching pilots.
(As Edison said, “I haven’t failed. I’ve simply
found 10,000 ways that do not work.”) The
world is their laboratory. Unlike observers,
who intensely watch the world, experimenters
construct interactive experiences and try to
How Innovators Stack Up
This chart shows how four well-known innovative entrepreneurs rank on each of the discovery skills. All our high-profile innovators scored above the 80th percentile on questioning, yet each combined the discovery skills uniquely to forge new insights.
ASSOCIATING
100
QUESTIONING
OBSERVING
EXPERIMENTING
NETWORKING
Michael Dell
Michael Lazaridis
80
Pierre Omidyar
60
Scott Cook
Noninnovators
40
PERCENTILE
Rankings are based on a survey of more than 3,000 executives and entrepreneurs.
harvard business review • december 2009
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The Innovator’s DNA •• •S POTLIGHT ON I NNOVATION
provoke unorthodox responses to see what
insights emerge.
The innovative entrepreneurs we interviewed all engaged in some form of active
experimentation, whether it was intellectual
exploration (Michael Lazaridis mulling over
the theory of relativity in high school), physical tinkering (Jeff Bezos taking apart his
crib as a toddler or Steve Jobs disassembling
a Sony Walkman), or engagement in new surroundings (Starbucks founder Howard Shultz
roaming Italy visiting coffee bars). As executives of innovative enterprises, they make
experimentation central to everything they
do. Bezos’s online bookstore didn’t stay where
it was after its initial success; it morphed
into an online discount retailer, selling a full
line of products from toys to TVs to home
appliances. The electronic reader Kindle is an
experiment that is now transforming Amazon
from an online retailer to an innovative
electronics manufacturer. Bezos sees experimentation as so critical to innovation that
he has institutionalized it at Amazon. “I encourage our employees to go down blind
alleys and experiment,” Bezos says. “If we can
get processes decentralized so that we can do
a lot of experiments without it being very
costly, we’ll get a lot more innovation.”
Scott Cook, too, stresses the importance of
creating a culture that fosters experimentation. “Our culture opens us to allowing lots
of failures while harvesting the learning,”
he told us. “It’s what separates an innovation
culture from a normal corporate culture.”
One of the most powerful experiments innovators can engage in is living and working
overseas. Our research revealed that the more
countries a person has lived in, the more
likely he or she is to leverage that experience
to deliver innovative products, processes,
or businesses. In fact, if managers try out
even one international assignment before
becoming CEO, their companies deliver stronger financial results than companies run
by CEOs without such experience—roughly
7% higher market performance on average,
according to research by Gregersen, Mason A.
Carpenter, and Gerard W. Sanders. P&G’s
A.G. Lafley, for example, spent time as a
student studying history in France and
running retail operations on U.S. military
bases in Japan. He returned to Japan later
to head all of P&G’s Asia operations before
harvard business review • december 2009
becoming CEO. His diverse international experience has served him well as the leader
of one of the most innovative companies in
the world.
Discovery Skill 5: Networking
Devoting time and energy to finding and
testing ideas through a network of diverse
individuals gives innovators a radically different perspective. Unlike most executives—who
network to access resources, to sell themselves
or their companies, or to boost their careers—
innovative entrepreneurs go out of their way
to meet people with different kinds of ideas
and perspectives to extend their own knowledge domains. To this end, they make a conscious effort to visit other countries and
meet people from other walks of life.
They also attend idea conferences such as
Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED),
Davos, and the Aspen Ideas Festival. Such conferences draw together artists, entrepreneurs,
academics, politicians, adventurers, scientists,
and thinkers from all over the world, who
come to present their newest ideas, passions,
and projects. Michael Lazaridis, the founder of
Research In Motion, notes that the inspiration
for the original BlackBerry occurred at a
conference in 1987. A speaker was describing a
wireless data system that had been designed
for Coke; it allowed vending machines to
send a signal when they needed refilling.
“That’s when it hit me,” Lazaridis recalls.
“I remembered what my teacher said in high
school: ‘Don’t get too caught up with computers because the person that puts wireless
technology and computers together is going to
make a big difference.’” David Neeleman came
up with key ideas for JetBlue—such as satellite
TV at every seat and at-home reservationists—
through networking at conferences and
elsewhere.
Kent Bowen, the founding scientist of CPS
technologies (maker of an innovative ceramic
composite), hung the following credo in every
office of his start-up: “The insights required to
solve many of our most challenging problems
come from outside our industry and scientific
field. We must aggressively and proudly incorporate into our work findings and advances
which were not invented here.” Scientists
from CPS have solved numerous complex
problems by talking with people in other
fields. One expert from Polaroid with in-depth
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The Innovator’s DNA •• •S POTLIGHT ON I NNOVATION
knowledge of film technology knew how to
make the ceramic composite stronger. Experts
in sperm-freezing technology knew how to
prevent ice crystal growth on cells during
freezing, a technique that CPS applied to its
manufacturing process with stunning success.
Practice, Practice, Practice
As innovators actively engage in the discovery
skills, they become defined by them. They
grow increasingly confident of their creative
abilities. For A.G. Lafley, innovation is the
central job of every leader, regardless of the
place he or she occupies on the organizational
chart. But what if you—like most executives—
don’t see yourself or those on your team as
particularly innovative?
Though innovative thinking may be innate
to some, it can also be developed and strengthened through practice. We cannot emphasize
enough the importance of rehearsing over
and over the behaviors described above, to the
point that they become automatic. This requires putting aside time for you and your
team to actively cultivate more creative ideas.
The most important skill to practice is
questioning. Asking “Why” and “Why not”
can help turbocharge the other discovery skills.
Ask questions that both impose and eliminate
constraints; this will help you see a problem
or opportunity from a different angle. Try
Put a Ding in the Universe
Why do innovators question, observe,
experiment, and network more than
typical executives? As we examined what
motivates them, we discovered two common themes: (1) They actively desire to
change the status quo, and (2) they
regularly take risks to make that change
happen. Throughout our research, we
were struck by the consistency of
language that innovators use to describe
their motives. Jeff Bezos wants to “make
history,” Steve Jobs to “put a ding in the
universe,” Skype cofounder Niklas
Zennström to “be disruptive, but in
the cause of making the world a better
place.” These innovators steer entirely
clear of a common cognitive bias called
the status quo bias—the tendency to
harvard business review • december 2009
prefer an existing state of affairs to
alternative ones.
Embracing a mission for change
makes it much easier to take risks and
make mistakes. For most of the innovative entrepreneurs we studied, mistakes
are nothing to be ashamed of; in fact,
they are expected as a cost of doing business. “If the people running Amazon.com
don’t make some significant mistakes,”
explained Bezos, “then we won’t be doing
a good job for our shareholders because
we won’t be swinging for the fences.” In
short, innovators rely on their “courage
to innovate”—an active bias against the
status quo and an unflinching willingness
to take risks—to transform ideas into
powerful impact.
spending 15 to 30 minutes each day writing
down 10 new questions that challenge the
status quo in your company or industry.
“If I had a favorite question to ask, everyone
would anticipate it,” Michael Dell told us. “Instead I like to ask things people don’t think
I’m going to ask. This is a little cruel, but I
kind of delight in coming up with questions
that nobody has the answer to quite yet.”
To sharpen your own observational skills,
watch how certain customers experience a
product or service in their natural environment. Spend an entire day carefully observing
the “jobs” that customers are trying to get
done. Try not to make judgments about what
you see: Simply pretend you’re a fly on the
wall, and observe as neutrally as possible.
Scott Cook advises Intuit’s observers to ask,
“What’s different than you expected?” Follow
Richard Branson’s example and get in the
habit of note taking wherever you go. Or
follow Jeff Bezos’s: “I take pictures of really
bad innovations,” he told us, “of which there
are a number.”
To strengthen experimentation, at both
the individual and organizational levels,
consciously approach work and life with a
hypothesis-testing mind-set. Attend seminars
or executive education courses on topics outside your area of expertise; take apart a product or process that interests you; read books
that purport to identify emerging trends.
When you travel, don’t squander the opportunity to learn about different lifestyles and
local behavior. Develop new hypotheses from
the knowledge you’ve acquired and test them
in the search for new products or processes.
Find ways to institutionalize frequent, small
experiments at all levels of the organization.
Openly acknowledging that learning through
failure is valuable goes a long way toward
building an innovative culture.
To improve your networking skills, contact
the five most creative people you know and
ask them to share what they do to stimulate
creative thinking. You might also ask if they’d
be willing to act as your creative mentors. We
suggest holding regular idea lunches at which
you meet a few new people from diverse
functions, companies, industries, or countries.
Get them to tell you about their innovative
ideas and ask for feedback on yours.
•••
Innovative entrepreneurship is not a genetic
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The Innovator’s DNA •• •S POTLIGHT ON I NNOVATION
predisposition, it is an active endeavor. Apple’s
slogan “Think Different” is inspiring but incomplete. We found that innovators must consistently act different to think different. By understanding, reinforcing, and modeling the
innovator’s DNA, companies can find ways to
more successfully develop the creative spark
in everyone.
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harvard business review • december 2009
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Further Reading
The Harvard Business Review
Paperback Series
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contemporary and classic—that have
established Harvard Business Review as required
reading for businesspeople around the globe.
Each paperback includes eight of the leading
articles on a particular business topic. The
series includes over thirty titles, including the
following best-sellers:
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Harvard Business Review on Measuring
Corporate Performance
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page 9
This document is authorized for use only in Angela Montgomery’s EXPIRE – WAL WMBA 6020 Fostering a Culture of Innovation at Laureate Education – Baltimore from Sep 2018 to Nov 2019.
www.hbr.org
Your organization could use a
bigger dose of creativity.
Here’s what to do about it.
Creativity and the Role
of the Leader
by Teresa M. Amabile and Mukti Khaire
Included with this full-text Harvard Business Review article:
1 Article Summary
The Idea in Brief—the core idea
The Idea in Practice—putting the idea to work
2 Creativity and the Role of the Leader
11 Further Reading
A list of related materials, with annotations to guide further
exploration of the article’s ideas and applications
Reprint R0810G
This document is authorized for use only in Angela Montgomery’s EXPIRE – WAL WMBA 6020 Fostering a Culture of Innovation at Laureate Education – Baltimore from Sep 2018 to Nov 2019.
Creativity and the Role of the Leader
The Idea in Brief
The Idea in Practice
In today’s innovation-driven economy,
understanding how to generate great ideas
is an urgent managerial priority. And that
calls for major doses of creativity. But many
leaders assume creativity is too elusive and
intangible to be managed.
To enhance organizational creativity, consider these practices:
It’s true that you can’t manage creativity.
But you can manage for creativity, say
innovation leaders and experts who participated in a 2008 Harvard Business School
colloquium. Among their recommendations for fostering the conditions in which
creativity flourishes:
• Stop thinking of yourself as the wellspring of ideas that employees execute.
Instead, elicit and champion others’
ideas.
COPYRIGHT © 2008 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
• Open your organization to diverse
perspectives—by getting people of
different disciplines, backgrounds, and
areas of expertise to share their thinking.
• Know when to impose controls on the
creative process (such as during the
commercialization phase) and when not
to (during early-idea generation).
TAP IDEAS FROM ALL RANKS
PROTECT CREATIVES FROM BUREAUCRACY
Elicit ideas from people throughout your organization. Google’s founders Sergey Brin and
Larry Page tracked the progress of ideas that
came from them versus ideas that bubbled
up from the ranks—and discovered a higher
success rate in the latter category.
As a fresh idea travels through an organization
toward commercialization, powerful constituencies often beat it into a shape that conforms
to the existing model. Protect those doing
creative work from this hostile environment
by clearing paths for them around obstacles.
Motivate people to contribute ideas by
making it safe to fail. Stress that the goal is to
experiment constantly, fail early and often—
and learn as much as possible in the process.
Convince people that they won’t be punished
or humiliated if they speak up or make
mistakes.
Further engage people by being an appreciative audience. Asking questions about a
project and providing even a word of sincere
recognition can be more motivating than
money.
OPEN YOUR COMPANY TO DIVERSE
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