How is the innovator's DNA different?

"How can we discover innovative talents for the company? How can we be more innovative? "These problems have left executives with a headache. Unfortunately, most people do not know why some people are more creative than others. In order to find the answer to these questions, the author of this article conducted a six-year study to study the habits of 25 innovative entrepreneurs and visited more than 3,000 senior executives, and more than 500 people who have created innovative companies or have invented new products.

The authors found that senior executives in the most innovative companies (only 15% of the total number of companies being studied) do not push innovation to others. They will go into battle in person. But how did they do it? Through research, the authors found that the most creative managers have five unique "Exploration skills", which are Lenovo, questioning, and observing) experimenting and networking ). Innovative CEOs spend 50% more time on these exploration activities than other common CEOs. These exploration skills combine to form the innovator DNA described by the author ".

 

Discovery Skill 1: Lenovo-or the ability to successfully associate seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas from different fields-is at the core of innovator DNA. Francis johnsonreferred to this phenomenon as the "Mei diqi effect", referring to the Renaissance, where the Italian family of mediqi had gathered people from different disciplines, as a result, new ideas emerged from the intersections in their respective fields, such as the sculptor, scientist, poet, philosopher, painter, and architect. This is what Apple founder Steve Jobs often says: "creativity is to link things. "

 

Exploration Skill 2: challenges more than 50 years ago, Peter Drucker depicts the power of disruptive questioning. He wrote: "An important and arduous task is never to find the right answer, but to ask the right question. "The former CEO of e-harbor, meig wän, worked directly with several innovative entrepreneurs, including the founder of e-harbor, PayPal, and Skype. She also said: "They like to break the status quo and cannot stand the same. Therefore, they will spend a lot of time thinking about how to change the world. During brainstorming, they often ask, 'If we do this, what will happen? '"

 

Exploration skill 3: observing and examining common phenomena, especially potential customers' behaviors, allows enterprise executives with the spirit of exploration to propose unusual business ideas. They observe other people and society just like the anthropology and social scientists. Scott Cook, the founder of caijie, saw his wife very frustrated when he was struggling to record his family's financial status. As a result, he began to solve his wife's problem and seized half of the financial software market in the first year.

 

Discovery skill 4: like scientists, innovative entrepreneurs are also experimenting with new ideas by making samples and conducting small-scale experiments. For example, Amazon's Bezos believes that experimentation is essential to innovation, and he even sets it out as a system in Amazon. "I encourage our employees to explore and experiment," Bezos said. "If we can decentralize the process, we can perform a lot of low-cost tests, we will get more innovations. "

 

Exploration skill 5: establish connections common executives build connections only to acquire resources, promote themselves or their companies, or find the path to promotion, while innovative entrepreneurs expand their knowledge fields. To this end, they consciously visit other countries to create different types of people. For example, Michael lazaridis, founder of RIM, mentioned that the earliest inspiration for Blackberry was a conference he attended in 1987.

 

Innovative Thinking is inherent to some people, but it can also be developed and strengthened in practice. Innovators must persistently think differently from others. By understanding, reinforcing, and simulating the innovator's DNA, enterprises can find more effective ways to stimulate everyone's creative sparks.