Course name: Innovation and creativity Chapter 05: innovative people

1. Chapter 05: Innovative people
BY KAMAL M. AL MASRI
Israa University Gaza
Faculty of Managerial and Financial Sciences
Departmentof Management
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Course code: ::::.BEAD4312..::::

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Introduction
Innovation needs a real leadership as well
as a nurturing and encouraging
environment.
The personality of employees and
organizations counts.

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Internal drivers of creativity, innovation
and change (next chapter).
 Many factors can affect this environment:
1- people: Skills, attitudes
2- primary task (core or main business),
3- technology,
4- administrative structures,
…
Recall

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Creative and innovative persons
 The place of people is central in the innovation process…
 Attitudes, beliefs, technical skills, and behaviors have a direct
impact on innovation.
 Reciprocal (bidirectional) relationship between the
environment and innovative (creative) persons.
A. The environment has a strong impact on people.
B. Innovative people influence their environment.

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Who is the innovator?
Leonardo Da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Pierre Omidyar,
Jeff Bezoz, Elon Musk, Thomas Edison, …
 What do they have in common?
 What is special with them?
What can we learn from them?

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Not as easy as some think …
Theories try to explain, through answering
questions like:
 What are the main characteristics of innovative people (personae
and/or behavioral)?
 How to promote innovative skills and abilities?
 Who to select innovative persons?
 Should they be a copy of Steve Jobs?
Simple questions, but ….

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What makes Innovators different?
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”.

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Innovators
engage both
sides of the
brain as they
leverage the
five discovery
skills to create
new ideas.
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To read:
Creative
Intelligence:
Harnessing the
Power to Create,
Connect, and
Inspire Hardcover –
March 5, 2013

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Let’s detect some behavior…
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. (Dyer et al., 2011:28)

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Let’s detect some behavior… (cont.)
 In contrast, your twin:
 (1) talks with 10 people (an engineer, a musician, a stay-at-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?

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A cognitive skill of “associational thinking”
Innovators “Think Different,” to use a well-known Apple
slogan.
Their minds excel at linking together ideas that aren’t
obviously related to produce original ideas (we call
this cognitive skill “associational thinking” or
“associating”).
But to think different, innovators had to “act
different.”
Many different models …

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The innovator’s DNA Model

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1- Questioning
 Innovators are good questioners who show a passion for
inquiry.
 Their queries frequently challenge the status quo.
 Just as Jobs did when he asked, “Why does a computer need a fan?”
 They love to ask, “If we tried this, what would happen?”
 Innovators, like Jobs, ask questions to understand how things really are today, why they
are that way, and how they might be changed or disrupted.
 Collectively, their questions provoke new insights,
connections, possibilities, and directions.

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Questions are important …
Dyer et al. (2011), found that innovators
consistently demonstrate a high Q/A ratio,
where questions (Q) not only outnumber
answers (A) in a typical conversation, but are
valued at least as highly as good answers.

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2- Observing
 Innovators are also intense observers.
 They carefully watch the world around them including
customers, products, services, technologies, and companies.
 The observations help them gain insights into and ideas for
new ways of doing things.
 Jobs’s observation trip to Xerox PARC provided the germ of insight that was the
catalyst for both the Macintosh’s innovative operating system and mouse, and
Apple’s current OSX operating system.

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3- Networking
 Innovators spend a lot of time and energy finding and testing
ideas through a diverse network of individuals who vary wildly
in their backgrounds and perspectives.
 Rather than simply doing social networking or networking for
resources, they actively search for new ideas by talking to people
who may offer a radically different view of things.
 For example, Jobs talked with an Apple Fellow named Alan Kay, who told him to “go visit
these crazy guys up in San Rafael, California.”
 The crazy guys were Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray, who headed up a small computer graphics
operation called Industrial Light & Magic (the group created special effects for George
Lucas’s movies). This gave birth later to Pixar Studios.

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4- Experimenting
 Finally, innovators are constantly trying out new experiences and piloting
new ideas.
 Experimenters unceasingly explore the world intellectually and
experientially, holding convictions at bay and testing hypotheses along the
way.
 They visit new places, try new things, seek new information, and
experiment to learn new things.
 Jobs, for example, has tried new experiences all his life—from meditation and living in an ashram in
India to dropping in on a calligraphy class at Reed College.
 All these varied experiences would later trigger ideas for innovations at Apple Computer.

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Code for generating innovative business
ideas
Collectively, these discovery skills —the cognitive
skill of associating and the behavioral skills of
questioning, observing, networking, and
experimenting— constitute what we call the
innovator’s DNA, or the code for generating
innovative business ideas.

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The research says:
Discovery Skill Strengths Differ for Disruptive
Innovators To understand that innovative
entrepreneurs develop and use different skills,
look at figure.
It shows the percentile rank scores on each of the
five discovery skills for four well-known founders
and innovators:
 Pierre Omidyar (eBay), Michael Dell (Dell), Michael Lazaridis (Research In
Motion), and Scott Cook (Intuit).

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The percentile rank indicates the percentage of over five thousand executives and innovators
in our database who scored lower on that particular skill.
A particular skill is measured by the frequency and intensity with which these individuals
engage in activities that compose the skill.

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The challenge and courage to innovate
Why do innovators question, observe, network,
and experiment more than typical executives?
 Two common themes:
 First, they actively desire to change the status quo.
 Second, they regularly take smart risks to make that change happen.
 Consider the consistency of language that innovators use to
describe their motives.
 to “put a ding in the universe.”, to “change the world.”
 These innovators steer entirely clear of a common cognitive trap
called the status quo bias.

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“the status quo bias”
The status quo bias: the tendency to prefer an
existing state of affairs to alternative ones.
It is an emotional bias; a preference for the
current state of affairs.
Most of us simply accept the status quo!

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Rationale (Adair et al., 2004)
Managers should remember that creativity
should challenge the status quo to test
continuously for improvements, because:
a thing is not right because we do it
a method is not good because we use it
equipment is not the best because we own it

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Courage and ambition…
I’m out to “change
the world ...” LarryPage,Google
Cofounder

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In summary, the DNA of innovators—or the code for
generating innovative ideas—is expressed in the model:
 The key skill for generating innovative ideas is the cognitive skill of
associational thinking.
 The reason that some people generate more associations than others is partly
because their brains are just wired that way.
 Concretely: they frequently engage in the behavioral skills (4 skills).
 These are the catalysts for associational thinking.
 Why do some people engage these four skills more than others?
 Answer: they have the courage to innovate.

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Innovation also needs passion…
“Innovation starts with the heart—with
a passion for improving the lives of
those around you.”
 Gary Hamel, The Heart of Innovation

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To be creative an individual should: (Adair, et al.)
 1- think beyond the invisible frameworks that surround
problems /situations
 2- recognize when assumptions are being made and challenge
them
 3- spot blinkered thinking and widen the field of vision (to
draw on the experiences of other individuals/businesses)
 4- develop/adapt ideas from more than one source

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Cont.
 5- practice serendipity (finding valuable and agreeable things
when not particularly seeking them) – having a wide attention
span and range of interests is important
 6- ‘transfer technology’ from one field to another
 7- be open/prepared to use chance or unpredictable
things/events to advantage
 8- explore thought processes and the key elements of the
mind at work in analyzing, valuing and synthesizing

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Cont.
 9- use his/her ‘depth’ mind (the unconscious mind) for example by
sleeping on a problem to generate creative solutions to problems
 10- note down thoughts/ideas that apparently drop into the mind
unsolicited so that they are not forgotten
 11- use analogy (to improve imaginative thinking) to find ‘models’ or
solutions in ‘nature’, in existing products/services and/or in other
organizations – not always reinventing the wheel
 12- try, as appropriate, to sometimes make the strange familiar and
the familiar strange to spark new ideas

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Cont.
13- make connections with points that are:
 • apparently irrelevant
 • disguised/buried or not easily accessible
 • outside own sphere of expertise
 • lacking authority
14- suspend judgement to encourage the creative
process and avoid premature criticism – analysis
and criticism repress creativity)

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Cont.
 15- know when to leave a problem (remaining aware but
detached) for solutions to emerge – patience is important
here as is the suspension of judgment
 16- tolerate ambiguity and occasionally live with doubt and
uncertainty
 17 stimulate own curiosity (in everything including travel)
and the skills of observation, listening, reading and
recording.

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References
 Essentials of the Management of Creativity and Innovation in Education, Business, and
Engineering, Christian H. Werner and Min Tang, 2017. in Handbook of the management of
creativity and innovation: Theory and practice, World Scientific Press, 2017.
 Thorogood,.The John Adair Handbook of Management and
Leadership.[2004.ISBN1854180045]
 Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, Clayton M. Christensen-The Innovator's DNA_ Mastering the
Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators -Harvard Business Press (2011)

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Additional references
HANDBOOK OF THE MANAGEMENT OF CREATIVITY
AND INNOVATION, Theory and Practice (see)
 Section III Creativity and Innovation in Business 153
 Chapter 8 The Management of Creativity and Innovation: Is It Possible and How? 155
Andreas Reichert
 Chapter 9 Good Practice of Creativity and Innovation Management in Business 175 Eric
Shiu
 Chapter 10 Innovation Management for Products and Processes in the Automobile
Industry: Example of BMW 191 Eric Shiu, Andreas Bonacina and Franz-Michael
Binninger

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Thank you!