Innovation, like creativity, is a wildly elusive quality. Corporates pursue it hard in the interests of their own resilience and success: they set up innovation divisions, train their talent in techniques associated with innovation, hire innovation agencies, and yet…. To use the expression, it’s like trying to hold a rainbow in your hand.
In a 2009 Harvard Business Review article, The Innovator’s DNA, the authors Hal Gregersen, Clayton Christensen and Jeff Dyer, all thought leaders in innovation, wrestled with this issue, trying to identify the qualities that add up to “innovativeness”. Here’s what they found.
The challenge from us to you is: 15 years later, in a very different world to their well-resourced American one, how much further can South African thinkers and entrepreneurs take this?
FIVE QUALITIES OF INNOVATIVE PEOPLE
The five qualities the writers’ research uncovered that are most closely linked with innovation are: associating, questioning, observing, experimenting, and networking.
Associating is the ability to join the dots – to connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas from different fields. The writers describe this as “like a mental muscle that can grow stronger”. For instance: most of us know first-hand that getting required documentation out of the Department of Home Affairs is a painful process of long queues and broken technology. On the other hand, visa companies have shown the way to navigating government departments through concierge services. Is there a business opportunity in there, a way to help South Africans replace passports and ID documents without days spent in queues and months-long waits? What can we learn from concierge services that can be applied to a South African government department, in the interests of resolving a very time-consuming issue for many?
Questioning may be discouraged in the classroom and the boardroom, but is exactly what is needed in the world. The status quo is the anti-innovation. Management guru Peter Drucker summed this up: “The important and difficult job is never to find the right answers,’ he said. “it is to find the right question.” People in leadership positions are often very taxed by the fact that others look to them for answers. How refreshing might it be for leaders to drive curiosity and set the tone by inviting colleagues to interrogate their thinking; to ask “why?” and “why not?” and “what if?”
Observing is about looking at the world as if you were an anthropologist or social scientist. It’s only through noticing things like where people struggle, that you understand where gaps exist that need to be filled. A classic example is mPesa, the mobile money service that arose in Kenya from the observations that (a) almost everyone had a phone; (b) banking services in the region were extremely poor; and (c) people were already using phones, through the mechanism of trading in airtime, to send money to relatives across the country.
Experimenting – creating prototypes, launching pilots. Learning, improving, testing again. Jeff Bezos sees experimentation as so critical to innovation that he has institutionalised it at Amazon. “I encourage our employees to go down blind alleys and experiment,” he told the authors. “If we can get processes decentralised so that we can do a lot of experiments without it being very costly, we’ll get a lot more innovation.” The MVP – minimal viable product – is our friend.
Networking with the broadest possible range of diverse people. Each new perspective can drive one or more of the other qualities – most particularly questioning, associating and observing. Don’t network only to sell yourself or your enterprise; network to learn. Seek people who have different kinds of ideas and perspectives, people from other walks of life. Find them at TED talks, HeavyChef events, seminars or other thinking spaces which attract everyone from artists to academics, entrepreneurs to adventurers.
But what if youdon’t see yourself as particularly innovative?
Well, it’s quite likely you’re not one of those for whom innovative thinking is instinctive. But that muscle can be developed and strengthened through practising the behaviours described here. Treat innovating as the verb that it is – a doing word, something that doesn’t take place unless you’re driving the doing.