1. No category

Innovation:!
How to Fuel Your Business with New Ideas!!
!
Adjusting the Individual and Organizational “Innovator’s DNA”!
Business Expo – Oak Cliff Chamber of Commerce & UNT at Dallas
Version 1, 13 October 2011
Prepared by Peter Jay Sorenson CMC
Strategic Organization Design, Inc.
[email protected]
http://www.strategicorganizationdesign.com
817-313-1248
Based on: Dyer, Jeff, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's DNA:
Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, Harvard Business Press, Boston, MA,
2011. (ISBN-10: 1422134814; ISBN-13: 978-1422134818)
Version 1, 13 October 2011
[email protected]
Innovation: How to Fuel Your Business with
New Ideas!
©Peter Jay Sorenson CMC® - 1
Strategic Organization Design, Inc.
Solving Messes
In a real sense, problems do not exist. They are distractions
from real situations. The real situations from which they are
abstracted are messes. A mess is a system of interrelated
problems. The solution to a mess is not equal to the sum of
the solution to its parts. The solution to its parts should be
derived from a solution to the whole; not vice versa. Science
has provided powerful methods, techniques, and tools for
solving problems, but it s provided little that can help in
solving messes. The lack of mess-solving capability is the
most important challenge facing us.
Russell L. Ackoff, Re-defining the Future, Wiley, London, 1974
Version 1, 13 October 2011
[email protected]
Innovation: How to Fuel Your Business with
New Ideas!
©Peter Jay Sorenson CMC® - 2
Strategic Organization Design, Inc.
The Innovator’s DNA Research
•  Compare innovators with non-innovators
•  In depth interviews with innovators and executives who
knew these innovators well (N = 30 + 50 innovators)
•  Compare with non-innovator executives (N = 400 then 5000)
•  Examined entrepreneurs versus large organization
executives
•  Interviews revealed 5 Discovery Skills:
•  4 Behavioral Skills
•  1 Cognitive Skill
•  Survey research clarified and validated the interconnection
and importance of the skills
For Details of the Research See: Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Volume 2, pages 317-338, 2008.
Version 1, 13 October 2011
[email protected]
Innovation: How to Fuel Your Business with
New Ideas!
©Peter Jay Sorenson CMC® - 3
Strategic Organization Design, Inc.
The Innovator’s DNA that Generates New Ideas
Courage to
Innovate
Behavioral
Skills
Cognitive Skill
to Synthesize
Novel Inputs
Innovative
Ideas
Associational
Thinking
Innovative
Ideas
Questioning
Challenging
the Status Quo
Observing
Taking Smart
Risks
Networking
Experimenting
Based on: The Innovator's DNA, page 27
Version 1, 13 October 2011
[email protected]
Innovation: How to Fuel Your Business with
New Ideas!
©Peter Jay Sorenson CMC® - 4
Strategic Organization Design, Inc.
•  Innovators “actively desire to change the status quo.”
•  Innovators “regularly take smart risks to make that change
happen.”
•  Steve Jobs (Apple) wants to “put a ding in the universe.”
The Innovator’s DNA, pages 25-27
Courage to Innovate
•  Larry Page (Google) is out to “change the world.”
•  “We found that innovative entrepreneurs (who are also
CEOs) spend 50% more time on discovery activities
(questioning, observing, experimenting, and networking)
than CEOs with no innovation track record.”
•  “Innovators rely on their ‘courage to innovate’ – an active
bias against the status quo and an unflinching willingness to
take smart risks – to transform ideas into powerful impact.”
Version 1, 13 October 2011
[email protected]
Innovation: How to Fuel Your Business with
New Ideas!
©Peter Jay Sorenson CMC® - 5
Strategic Organization Design, Inc.
Associating
Innovators think differently (to be grammatically correct), but as
Steve Jobs put it, they really just think different by connecting
the unconnected. Einstein once called creative thinking
“combinatorial play” and saw it as “the essential feature in
productive thought.” Associating – or the ability to make
surprising connections across areas of knowledge, industries,
even geographies – is an often-taken-for-granted skill among
the innovators we studied. Innovators actively pursue diverse
new information and ideas through questioning, observing,
networking, and experimenting – the key catalysts for creative
associations.
The Innovator’s DNA, page 41
Version 1, 13 October 2011
[email protected]
Innovation: How to Fuel Your Business with
New Ideas!
©Peter Jay Sorenson CMC® - 6
Strategic Organization Design, Inc.
Associating
Innovative leaders at well-known companies such as Apple,
Amazon, and Virgin do exactly the same thing. They crosspollinate ideas in their own heads and in others. They connect
wildly different ideas, objects, services, technologies, and
disciplines to dish up new and unusual innovations. “Creativity
is connecting things,” as Steve Jobs once put it. He continued,
“When you ask creative people how they did something, they
feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw
something . . . . They were able to connect experiences
they’ve had and synthesize new things.” This is how
innovators think different, or what we call associating, a
cognitive skill at the core of the innovator’s DNA.
The Innovator’s DNA, page 45
Version 1, 13 October 2011
[email protected]
Innovation: How to Fuel Your Business with
New Ideas!
©Peter Jay Sorenson CMC® - 7
Strategic Organization Design, Inc.
Zooming In & Zooming Out
Innovative entrepreneurs often exhibit the capacity to do two things
at once: they dive deep into the details to understand the subtle
nuances of a particular customer experience, and they fly high to
see how the details fit into the bigger picture. Synthesizing these
two views often results in surprising associations. Niklas Zennström
(co-founder of Skype) explained this process of zooming in and out
based on his own experience: “You have to think laterally. You
know, seeing and combining certain things going on at the same
time and understanding how seemingly unrelated things could have
something to do with each other. You need the ability to grasp
different things going on at the same time and then to bring them
together. For example, I can look at the bigger picture and also
have a very good feel for the details. So I can go between high-level
things to really, really small details. The movement often makes for
new associations.”
The Innovator’s DNA, page 53 & 54
Version 1, 13 October 2011
[email protected]
Innovation: How to Fuel Your Business with
New Ideas!
©Peter Jay Sorenson CMC® - 8
Strategic Organization Design, Inc.
Levels of Analysis, Synthesis, & Action
The Global Marketplace - Societies
Collaborations of Enterprises
Whole Enterprises
Culture
Functions, Disciplines, Processes
Culture
Business Units
Work Sites
Teams with Teams
Teams & Groups
Individual Work
Prepared by © Peter Jay Sorenson CMC® - 15 August 2011
Version 1, 13 October 2011
[email protected]
Innovation: How to Fuel Your Business with
New Ideas!
©Peter Jay Sorenson CMC® - 9
Strategic Organization Design, Inc.
Balancing Discovery & Delivery Skills
Discovery Driven
Delivery Driven
• Associating
• Analyzing
• Questioning
• Planning
• Observing
• Detail-Oriented
Implementing
• Idea Networking
• Self-Disciplined
• Experimenting
Based on: The Innovator's DNA, page 184
Version 1, 13 October 2011
[email protected]
Innovation: How to Fuel Your Business with
New Ideas!
©Peter Jay Sorenson CMC® - 10
Strategic Organization Design, Inc.
Discovery Versus Delivery Over the Life Cycle
The Innovation Life
Cycle “S” Curve
Start Up
Stage
Organizational
Imperative
Organization
Primarily Rewards
Organization
Secondarily Rewards
•
•
•
Growth
Stage
Develop &
Launch New
Business Idea
•
Discovery
Skills
•
Delivery Skills
•
•
Mature
Stage
Scale the New
Business Idea
Build
Processes to
Execute
Consistently &
Systematically
•
Exploit
Resources &
Capabilities
Generated
During Growth
Phase
Delivery Skills
•
Delivery Skills
Discovery
Skills
•
Decline
Stage
•
Harvest, Find,
or Develop
Other New
Business Ideas
•
Delivery Skills
Still Dominate,
But Discovery
Skills Increase
in Importance
Discovery
Skills
Based on: The Innovator's DNA, page 35
Version 1, 13 October 2011
[email protected]
Innovation: How to Fuel Your Business with
New Ideas!
©Peter Jay Sorenson CMC® - 11
Strategic Organization Design, Inc.
•  Orit Gadiesh (Bain): “asking clients lots of questions is key
to generating powerful solutions to problems.”
•  Einstein: “If I only had the right question . . . If I only had
the right question . . .”
The Innovator’s DNA, pages 66-68
Questioning
•  Drucker: “. . . The important and difficult job is never to find
the right answers, it is to find the right question. For there
are few things as useless – if not dangerous – as the right
answer to the wrong question.”
•  “Our research (Innovator’s DNA) also found that disruptors
rely on crafting the right questions to accomplish their work.”
Version 1, 13 October 2011
[email protected]
Innovation: How to Fuel Your Business with
New Ideas!
©Peter Jay Sorenson CMC® - 12
Strategic Organization Design, Inc.
Observing & Seeing •  Scott Cook (Intuit): “Observation is a big game changer in our
company.” (p. 89)
•  Most innovators are intense observers. They carefully watch the
world around them, and as they observe how things work, they
often become sensitized to what doesn’t work.” (p. 89)
•  “How many executives are willing, on a whim, to just take a week
getting lost every day in an exploratory journey to observe
something of interest and to see where the journey takes
them?” (p 107)
•  Peter Leschak (New York Times): “All of us are watchers – of
television, of time clocks, of traffic on the freeway – but few are
observers. Everyone is looking, not many are seeing.6” (p. 108-9)
The Innovator's DNA
Version 1, 13 October 2011
[email protected]
Innovation: How to Fuel Your Business with
New Ideas!
©Peter Jay Sorenson CMC® - 13
Strategic Organization Design, Inc.
Networking
•  Einstein: “What a person does on his own, without being
stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of others, is even in
the best of cases rather paltry and monotonous.” (p. 113)
•  “Unlike typical delivery-driven executives who network to access
resources, sell themselves or their companies, or boost their
careers, innovators go out of their way to meet people with
different backgrounds and perspectives to extend their own
knowledge.” (p. 113)
•  Kent Bowen (CPS): “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.” (p. 121)
The Innovator's DNA
Version 1, 13 October 2011
[email protected]
Innovation: How to Fuel Your Business with
New Ideas!
©Peter Jay Sorenson CMC® - 14
Strategic Organization Design, Inc.
Networking Differences: Discovery Versus Delivery Driven
Discovery Driven
Why they Network: Ideas
• Learn new, surprising things
• Gain new perspectives
• Test ideas “in process”
Based on: The Innovator's DNA, page 115
Whom they Target:
• People who are not like them
• Experts and non-experts with
very different backgrounds and
perspectives
Version 1, 13 October 2011
[email protected]
Delivery Driven
Why they Network: Resources
• Access to resources
• Sell themselves or their
company
• Further their careers
Whom they Target:
• People who are like them
• People with substantial
resources, power, position,
influence, etc.
Innovation: How to Fuel Your Business with
New Ideas!
©Peter Jay Sorenson CMC® - 15
Strategic Organization Design, Inc.
Experimenting
•  “Good experimenters understand that although questioning,
observing, and networking provide data about the past (what was)
and the present (what is), experimenting is best suited for
generating data on what might work in the future. In other words,
it’s the best way to answer our “what-if” questions as we search
for new solutions. Often, the only way to get the necessary data
to move forward is to run the experiment.” (p 133)
•  George Box (American Statistical Association): “. . . the only way
to know how a complex system will behave – after you modify it –
is to modify it and see how it behaves.” (p 134)
•  Three ways innovators experiment: Try out new experiences;
take apart products, processes, and ideas; test ideas through
pilots and prototypes. (p 138)
The Innovator's DNA
Version 1, 13 October 2011
[email protected]
Innovation: How to Fuel Your Business with
New Ideas!
©Peter Jay Sorenson CMC® - 16
Strategic Organization Design, Inc.
Three Ways Innovators Experiment
Try Out New
Experiences
Examples:
• Live in a Different
Country
• Work in Multiple
Industries
Based on: The Innovator's DNA, page 138
• Develop a New
Skill
Take Apart
Products,
Processes, and
Ideas
Test Ideas
Through Pilots
and Prototypes
Examples:
Examples:
• Disassembles a
Product
• Visually Map Out a
Process
• Deconstruct an
• Build a Prototype
• Pilot a New
Process
• Launch a New
Venture on the
Market
Idea
Useful for Generating
New Business Ideas
Version 1, 13 October 2011
[email protected]
Useful for Generating
New Business Ideas
Useful for Generating
and Testing New Business
Ideas to See What Works
Innovation: How to Fuel Your Business with
New Ideas!
©Peter Jay Sorenson CMC® - 17
Strategic Organization Design, Inc.
Practices of the World’s Most Innovative Organizations
People
• Senior executive(s)
lead the innovative
charge and excel at
discovery (discovery
quotient .75%).
• Monitor and
maintain an adequate
proportion of highdiscovery-quotient
people in every
management level,
functional area, and
decision-making stage
of the innovation
process.
Version 1, 13 October 2011
[email protected]
Processes
Philosophies
• Processes explicitly
• 1: Innovation is
encourage employees
to associate,
question, observe,
network, and
experiment.
everyone’s job -- not
just R&Ds.
• 2: Disruption is part
• Processes are
• 3: Deploy small,
designed to hire,
train, reward, and
promote discoverydriven people.
of our innovation
portfolio.
properly organized
innovation project
teams.
• 4: Take smart risks in
pursuit of innovation.
Based on: Dyer, Jeff, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's
DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, Harvard Business Press,
Boston, MA, 2011. (ISBN-10: 1422134814; ISBN-13: 978-1422134818), page 170
Innovation: How to Fuel Your Business with
New Ideas!
©Peter Jay Sorenson CMC® - 18
Strategic Organization Design, Inc.
So What Do We Do Next?
Version 1, 13 October 2011
[email protected]
Innovation: How to Fuel Your Business with
New Ideas!
©Peter Jay Sorenson CMC® - 19
Strategic Organization Design, Inc.
Bibliography: The Innovator’s DNA
Dyer, Jeffrey H., Hal W. Gregersen, and Clayton M. Christensen, “Entrepreneur Behaviors, Opportunity
Recognition, and the Origins of Innovative Ventures,” Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Volume 2,
pages 317-338, 2008. (www.interscience.wiley.com)
Gregersen, Hal, “The Innovator’s DNA,” INSEAD, Fountainblue, France, 2009
Dyer, Jeffrey H., Hal B. Gregersen, and Clayton M. Christensen, “The Innovator’s DNA: Five ‘Discovery
Skills’ Separate True Innovators from the Rest of Us,” Harvard Business Review, December 2009, pages
60-67. (Reprint R0912E)
Dyer, Jeffrey H., Hal W. Gregersen, and Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the
Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, Harvard Business Press, Boston, MA, 2011. (ISBN-10: 1422134814;
ISBN-13: 978-1422134818)
The Forbes article 20 July 2011:
http://blogs.forbes.com/bruceupbin/2011/07/20/the-five-habits-of-highly-innovative-leaders/
Forbes YouTube Video interview with Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen 20 July 2011:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7er3WOADY8&feature=player_embedded
Version 1, 13 October 2011
[email protected]
Innovation: How to Fuel Your Business with
New Ideas!
©Peter Jay Sorenson CMC® - 20
Strategic Organization Design, Inc.