Reflection 3: Is innovation a genetic endowment?
Professor Hai Gregerson along with Clayton carried out an 8-year long research project and have shortlisted 5 essential skills and behaviors, in the book: “The Innovator’s DNA”, which can guide an aspiring candidate towards innovation.
Although most of us are familiar with the importance of these 5 skills and nothing new is discussed here, but still we lack the understanding to apply these in our lives. This book clearly guides us through this process which most of us ignore. The authors discuss how associative and behavioral skills combined together can expand one’s thinking abilities to establish new approaches to any problem.
Why I chose this book:
1. The overview of the book highlights the misbelief that innovation is not all because of genetics but majorly because of one’s experiences and skills. My thoughts strongly align with this statement.
2. The author of the book — Prof. Clayton is an expert in “disruptive innovation” whose research is applied to national economies and by fortune 50 companies. This feat is something that attracted me towards reading this book of his.
3. I aspire on becoming a project manager and having an innovative mindset is really important for me to reach this goal of mine. As new challenges come up every day, I want to make sure that my associative and behavioral skills allow me to come up with innovative solutions.
Things that caught my eye while reading this book:
1. According to the book ‘questioning’ and ‘observing’ are two essential traits for innovation. The book mentions a case of P&G’s CEO who used to go to retail stores and to customers and asked them questions about P&G products. I feel that this is what matters in the end — whether the customer is satisfied or not. No doubt the efforts of people while developing any new product matter a lot but what matters more is observing whether the customer is willing to use it again and what can one do to improve this customer experience and make this product a success.
2. The book also mentions ‘Networking’. Talking to people helps broaden one’s imagination. More people we talk to the more diverse insight we get of what is in demand or what might be the next big invention. Through the book, I understood that networking can either help us in achieving a new idea or enable us to help someone else do the same. And even if an idea is unachievable one can always put it out for some other day.
3. Finally, the research for this book was carried out by interviewing the founders and current CEOs of the 100 most innovative companies and surveys among 5,500 managers. These numbers prove the thoroughness and dedication of the authors and are enough to prove that disruptive innovation can definitely be achieved by investing time in these 5 skills.
To conclude, I’m very impressed with the efforts of the authors and the contents of this book. It contains simple topics which many of us humans tend to ignore. I’ll highly recommend this book to anyone who aspires to become an innovator or wants to be innovative in what they are doing.
