Reflection 3: Do you think innovators are born?

“You can be as innovative and impactful — if you can change your behaviors to improve your creative impact.” This is the first quote in the book “The Innovator’s DNA” by Clayton Christensen. This wonderful book is based on an eight-year survey and depicts five behaviors of innovators: associating, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting. It provides concrete suggestions, self-assessments, and tools to improve those skills.

I chose this book for three reasons:

1. Christensen is a well-respected writer and I love his approach to innovation based on the research.
2. He says that innovators are not born, they are made by learning certain behaviors. I wanted to learn more about those behaviors.
3. It closely relates to what we are learning in class, and it was interesting to relate the learnings to the author’s research.

What stood out to me the most are the following insights:

• When a company is at the start-up phase, the discovery skills of entrepreneurs are in high demand, but when the company starts to grow, the focus shifts to execution skills losing the innovative focus. Many large companies fail at disruptive innovation because senior executives are selected based on their execution skills, not innovative skills that allow people to think differently. On the contrary, those companies that continue to hire based on innovative skills, continue to disrupt, e.g. Amazon. Jeff Bezos asks every interviewee “what have you invented”. It reminded me of IDEO class reading and how its CEO selects employees based on T-shaped skills. They are experts in one skill but have experience in many other fields resulting in ability to relate, empathize, and explore insights from many different perspectives, just like innovators described in this book.
• The book also describes the difference in networking between discovery-driven and delivery-driven executives. Most leaders network to sell themselves or their companies while innovators network to find new ideas. Innovators network with people who are not like them and those from different backgrounds. The research shows that start-up entrepreneurs rank around 77 percentile while non-innovators rank around 47 percentile on idea networking. This means that talking to people from different business functions, socioeconomic groups, age groups, political groups or others, is most likely to spark innovative ideas.

My overall impression is very positive and I would love to read this book again in a year or two to reflect and ensure I am practicing the innovators’ skills.