Innovation Starts at the Top, says HBR Study
Posted on Thu, Aug 18, 2011
Last month, Forbes published a list of the world’s most innovative companies, developed by HOLT, a division of Credit Suisse, with companies ranked by innovation premium. While some question the methodology behind the innovation premium ranking, everyone recognizes that some companies are simply better than others when it comes to innovation. The question is: why?
A recently published 8-year study by Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School Professor and disruptive innovation guru, Jeff Dyer, a professor at Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen, a professor of leadership at INSEAD, looks at why some companies have a higher innovation premium while others do not.
The study and its insights (which have been packaged in a newly released book, The Innovator’s DNA) look at how successful innovation companies exploit new ideas, products and services to produce dynamic and lucrative new businesses. The book identifies the five skill sets that separate innovation leaders from the middle-of-the-pack:
- Associating—drawing connections between questions, problems, or ideas from unrelated fields
- Questioning—posing queries that challenge common wisdom
- Observing—scrutinizing the behavior of customers, suppliers, and competitors to identify new ways of doing things
- Networking—meeting people with different ideas and perspectives
- Experimenting—constructing interactive experiences and provoking unorthodox responses to see what insights emerge
A key finding of the study, which surveyed more than 5,000 executives and entrepreneurs is that:
“Top executives who value innovation need to point their fingers not at others but themselves. They must lead the innovation charge by understanding how innovation works, improving their own discovery skills, and sharpening their ability to foster the innovation of others. Moreover, they must actively populate their organizations with enough discovery-driven innovators to make innovation a team game that translates into tangible and sustainable innovation premiums.”
So what do you think? Does a CEO need to be personally innovative – to have innovation in their DNA - in order to drive their organization to innovation greatness? Or do they merely need to facilitate innovation?
The point is debatable, but most would agree that commitment to innovation must go beyond lip service. Yes, CEOs need to create a culture and environment where innovators can leverage their personal innovation strengths to solve problems. But CEOs must go further: engineers, scientists, researchers and all constituents of the product development process must be given the tools and knowledge they need in order to analyze markets and opportunities, speed problem solving and generate optimal ideas.
How is your organization leveraging knowledge, experience and expertise to boost its innovation premium?