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Jeff Dyer is the Horace

Hal Gregersen is a

professor of leadership
at INSEAD. He consults
to organizations around
the world on innovation,
globalization, and
transformation and has published extensively
in leading academic and business journals.
Clayton m. Christensen

is the Robert and Jane
Cizik Professor of Business
Administration at Harvard
Business School and the
architect of and the world’s
foremost authority on disruptive innovation.

To learn more, visit: InnovatorsDNA.com

“Businesses worldwide have been guided and influenced by The Innovator’s Dilemma and
The Innovator’s Solution. Now The Innovator’s DNA shows where it all starts. This book
gives you the fundamental building blocks for becoming more innovative and changing
the world. One of the most important books to come out this year, and one that will
remain pivotal reading for years to come.”
—Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO, salesforce.com; author, Behind the Cloud
“The Innovator’s DNA is the ‘how to’ manual to innovation, and to the fresh thinking that
is the root of innovation. It has dozens of simple tricks that any person and any team
can use today to discover the new ideas that solve the important problems. Buy it now
and read it tonight. Tomorrow you will learn more, create more, inspire more.”
—Scott D. Cook, Chairman of the Executive Committee, Intuit Inc.
“The Innovator’s DNA sheds new light on the once-mysterious art of innovation by
showing that successful innovators exhibit common behavioral habits—habits that can
boost anyone’s creative capacity.”
—Stephen R. Covey, author, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and
The Leader in Me
“Having worked with Clayton Christensen on innovation for over a decade, I can see
that The Innovator’s DNA continues to stretch our thinking with insights that challenge
convention and enable progress in the important cause of innovation . . . so critical to
competitiveness and growth.”
—A.G. Lafley, retired Chairman of the Board and CEO,
The Procter & Gamble Company

Also by Clayton M. Ch; ristensen:

US$29.95

Are you
the next
Steve Jobs?

the innovator’s dna

Beesley Professor of Strategy at
the Marriott School, Brigham
Young University. He is widely
published in strategy and
business journals and was the
fourth most cited management scholar from
1996–2006.

m a n ag em en t

dyer
gregersen
christensen

(Continued from front flap)

jacke t design: faceout studio
author photos: Mark Philbrick; Kenne th Linge ; Stuart Cahill

ISBN 978-1-4221-3481-8
9 0000

Get inspired.
Stay informed.
Join the discussion.
Visit www.hbr.org/books

Bestselling Author of The Innovator’s Dilemma
www.hbr.org/books

9 7 81 42 2 1 3 48 1 8

You can be as innovative and impactful—
if you can change your behaviors to improve
your creative impact.
In The Innovator’s DNA, authors Jeff Dyer,
Hal Gregersen, and bestselling author Clayton
M. Christensen (The Innovator’s Dilemma, The
Innovator’s Solution) build on what we know
about disruptive innovation to show how
individuals can develop the skills necessary to
move progressively from idea to impact.
By identifying behaviors of the world’s
best innovators—from leaders at Amazon
and Apple to those at Google, Skype, and
Virgin Group—the authors outline five
discovery skills that distinguish innovative
entrepreneurs and executives from ordinary
managers: Associating, Questioning, Observing,
Networking, and Experimenting.
Once you master these competencies
(the authors provide a self assessment for
rating your own innovator’s DNA), the
authors explain how you can generate ideas,
collaborate with colleagues to implement them,
and build innovation skills throughout your
organization to sharpen its competitive edge.
That innovation advantage can translate into
a premium in your company’s stock price—an
innovation premium—that is possible only by
building the code for innovation right into
your organization’s people, processes, and
guiding philosophies.
Practical and provocative, The Innovator’s
DNA is an essential resource for individuals
and teams who want to strengthen their
innovative prowess.
(Continued on back flap)

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Page i

THE
INNOVATOR’S
DNA

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THE
INNOVATOR’S
DNA
MASTERING THE FIVE SKILLS
OF DISRUPTIVE INNOVATORS

Jeff Dyer
Hal Gregersen
Clayton M. Christensen

H A R VA R D B U S I N E S S R E V I E W P R E S S
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

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Copyright 2011 Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton M. Christensen
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior
permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to
permissions@hbsp.harvard.edu, or mailed to Permissions, Harvard Business
School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02163.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dyer, Jeff.
The innovator’s DNA : mastering the five skills of disruptive innovators/
Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, Clayton M. Christensen.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-4221-3481-8 (hardback)
1. Creative ability in business. 2. Technological innovations.
3. Entrepreneurship. I. Gregersen, Hal B., 1958– II. Christensen,
Clayton M. III. Title.
HD53.D94 2011
658.4'063—dc22
2011008440
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American
National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Publications and Documents
in Libraries and Archives Z39.48-1992.

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Page v

Contents

Introduction

1

Part One
Disruptive Innovation Starts with You

1

The DNA of Disruptive Innovators

17

2

Discovery Skill #1

41

Associating

3

Discovery Skill #2

65

Questioning

4

Discovery Skill #3

89

Observing

5

Discovery Skill #4

113

Networking

6

Discovery Skill #5

133

Experimenting

Part Two
The DNA of Disruptive Organizations and Teams

7

The DNA of the World’s Most
Innovative Companies

157

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vi
CONTENTS

8

Putting the Innovator’s DNA into Practice

175

People

9

Putting the Innovator’s DNA into Practice

193

Processes

10

Putting the Innovator’s DNA into Practice

215

Philosophies

Conclusion: Act Different, Think Different,
Make a Difference

235

Appendix A: Sample of Innovators Interviewed
Appendix B: The Innovator’s DNA Research Methods
Appendix C: Developing Discovery Skills
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Authors

241
245
249
261
269
283
295

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I

It’s the lifeblood of our global economy and a strategic priority for virtually every
CEO around the world. In fact, a recent IBM poll of fifteen hundred CEOs identified creativity as the number-one “leadership
competency” of the future.1 The power of innovative ideas to revolutionize industries and generate wealth is evident from history:
Apple iPod outplays Sony Walkman, Starbucks’s beans and
atmosphere drown traditional coffee shops, Skype uses a strategy
of “free” to beat AT&T and British Telecom, eBay crushes classified ads, and Southwest Airlines flies under the radar of American
and Delta. In every case, the creative ideas of innovative entrepreneurs produced powerful competitive advantages and tremendous wealth for the pioneering company. Of course, the
retrospective $1 million question is, how did they do it? And perhaps the prospective $10 million question is, how could I do it?
The Innovator’s DNA tackles these fundamental questions—
and more. The genesis of this book centered on the question that
we posed years ago to “disruptive technologies” guru and coauthor Clayton Christensen: where do disruptive business models
come from? Christensen’s best-selling books, The Innovator’s
NNOVATION.

1

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Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, conveyed important insight into the characteristics of disruptive technologies, business
models, and companies. The Innovator’s DNA emerged from an
eight-year collaborative study in which we sought a richer understanding of disruptive innovators—who they are and the innovative companies they create. Our project’s primary purpose was
to uncover the origins of innovative—and often disruptive—
business ideas. So we interviewed nearly a hundred inventors of
revolutionary products and services, as well as founders and
CEOs of game-changing companies built on innovative business ideas. These were people such as eBay’s Pierre Omidyar,
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Research In Motion’s Mike Lazaridis,
and Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff. For a full list of innovators
we interviewed whom we quote in this book, see appendix A;
virtually all of the innovators we quote, with the exception
of Steve Jobs (Apple), Richard Branson (Virgin), and Howard
Schultz (Starbucks)—who have written autobiographies or have
given numerous interviews about innovation—are from our
interviews.
We also studied CEOs who ignited innovation in existing
companies, such as Procter & Gamble’s A. G. Lafley, eBay’s Meg
Whitman, and Bain & Company’s Orit Gadiesh. Some entrepreneurs’ companies that we studied were successful and well known;
some were not (for example, Movie Mouth, Cow-Pie Clocks,
Terra Nova BioSystems). But all offered a surprising and unique
value proposition relative to incumbents. For example, each offered new or different features, pricing, convenience, or customizability compared to their competition. Our goal was less to
investigate the companies’ strategies than it was to dig into the
thinking of the innovators themselves. We wanted to understand
as much about these people as possible, including the moment
(when and how) they came up with the creative ideas that
launched new products or businesses. We asked them to tell us

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about the most valuable and novel business idea that they had
generated during their business careers, and to tell us where those
ideas came from. Their stories were provocative and insightful,
and surprisingly similar.
As we reflected on the interviews, consistent patterns of action
emerged. Innovative entrepreneurs and executives behaved similarly when discovering breakthrough ideas. Five primary discovery skills—skills that compose what we call the innovator’s
DNA—surfaced from our conversations. We found that 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.” All were questioners, frequently asking
questions that punctured the status quo. Some observed the
world with intensity beyond the ordinary. Others networked with
the most diverse people on the face of the earth. Still others placed
experimentation at the center of their innovative activity. When
engaged in consistently, these actions—questioning, observing,
networking, and experimenting—triggered associational thinking to deliver new businesses, products, services, and/or
processes. Most of us think creativity is an entirely cognitive skill;
it all happens in the brain. A critical insight from our research is
that one’s ability to generate innovative ideas is not merely a function of the mind, but also a function of behaviors. This is good news
for us all because it means that if we change our behaviors, we can
improve our creative impact.
After surfacing these patterns of action for famous innovative
entrepreneurs and executives, we turned our research lens to the
less famous but equally capable innovators around the world.
We built a survey based on our interviews that taps into the
discovery skills of innovative leaders: associating, questioning,
observing, networking, and experimenting. To date, we have

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collected self-reported and 360-degree data on these discovery
skills from over five hundred innovators and over five thousand
executives in more than seventy-five countries (for information
about our assessments for individuals and companies, go to our
Web site: http://www.InnovatorsDNA.com). We found the same
pattern for famous as well as less famous leaders. Innovators were
simply much more likely to question, observe, network, and experiment compared to typical executives. We published the results of our research in Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, the top
academic journal focused on entrepreneurs (details of our study
are reported in appendix B).2 We also published our findings in an
article titled “The Innovator’s DNA,” which was the runner-up for
the 2009 Harvard Business Review McKinsey Award.
We then turned to see what we could learn about the DNA of
innovative organizations and teams. We started by looking at
BusinessWeek’s annual ranking of innovative companies. This
ranking, based on votes from executives, identified companies
with a reputation for being innovative. A quick look at the
BusinessWeek lists from 2005 to 2009 shows Apple as number one
and Google, number two. OK, intuitively that sounds right. But
we felt that the BusinessWeek methodology (executives voting on
which companies are innovative) produces a list that is largely a
popularity contest based on past performance. Indeed, do General Electric, Sony, Toyota, and BMW deserve to be on the list of
most innovative companies today? Or are they simply there because they have been successful in the past?
To answer these questions, we developed our own list of innovative companies based on current innovation prowess (and expectations of future innovations). How did we do this? We thought
the best way was to see whether investors—voting with their wallets—could give us insight into which companies they thought
most likely to produce future innovations: new products, services,
or markets. We teamed up with HOLT (a division of Credit Suisse
Boston that had done a similar analysis for The Innovator’s

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Who Is Classified as an Innovator?
Perhaps one of the most surprising findings from the past
thirty years of entrepreneurship research is that entrepreneurs
do not differ significantly (on personality traits or psychometric measures) from typical business executives.a We usually
meet this finding with skepticism, since most of us intuitively
believe that entrepreneurs are somehow different from other
executives. Note that our research focused on innovators
and, in particular, innovative entrepreneurs rather than entrepreneurs. Here’s why. Innovative entrepreneurs start companies that offer unique value to the market. When someone
opens a dry cleaner or a mortgage business, or even a set of
Volkswagen dealerships or McDonald’s franchises, researchers put them all in the same category of entrepreneur
as the founders of eBay (Pierre Omidyar) and Amazon (Jeff
Bezos). This creates a categorization problem when trying to
find out whether innovative entrepreneurs differ from typical
executives. The fact is that most entrepreneurs launch ventures based on strategies that are not unique and certainly
not disruptive. Among entrepreneurs as a whole, only 10 percent to 15 percent qualify as “innovative entrepreneurs” of the
kind we’re discussing.
Our study includes four types of innovators: (1) start-up entrepreneurs (as we described earlier), (2) corporate entrepreneurs (those who launch an innovative venture from within the
corporation), (3) product innovators (those who invent a new
product), and (4) process innovators (those who launch a
breakthrough process). Our process inventor category includes folks like A. G. Lafley, who initiated a set of innovative
processes at Procter & Gamble that sparked numerous new
product innovations. In all cases, the original idea for the new
(continued)

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business, product, or process must be the innovator’s idea.
While these different types of innovators have numerous similarities, they also have some differences, as we will show in
the chapters that follow.
a. This is evident in the conclusions of numerous studies on entrepreneurs,
including the following:
“After a great deal of research, it is now often concluded that most of
the psychological differences between entrepreneurs and managers
in large organizations are small or non-existent” (L. W. Busenitz and
J. B. Barney, “Differences Between Entrepreneurs and Managers in
Large Organizations,” Journal of Business Venturing 12, 1997).
“There appears to be no discoverable pattern of personality characteristics that distinguish between successful entrepreneurs and
non-entrepreneurs” (W. Guth, “Director’s Corner: Research in Entrepreneurship,” The Entrepreneurship Forum, winter 1991).
“Most of the attempts to distinguish between entrepreneurs and small
business owners or managers have discovered no differentiating
features” (R. H. Brockhaus and P. S. Horwitz, “The Psychology of the
Entrepreneur” in The Art and Science of Entrepreneurship, 1986).

Solution) to develop a methodology for determining what percentage of a firm’s market value could be attributed to its existing
businesses (products, services, markets). If the firm’s market value
was higher than the cash flows that could be attributed to its existing businesses, then the company would have a growth and innovation premium (for our purposes, we’ll just call it an innovation
premium). An innovation premium is the proportion of a company’s market value that cannot be accounted for from cash flows
of its current products or businesses in its current markets. It is
the premium the market gives these companies because investors
expect them to come up with new products or markets—and they
expect the companies to be able to generate high profits from
them (see chapter 7 for details on how the premium is calculated).

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It is a premium that every executive, and every company, would
like to have.
We unveil our list of the most innovative companies—ranked
by innovation premium—in chapter 7. Not surprisingly, we
found that our top twenty-five companies include some on the
BusinessWeek list—such as Apple, Google, Amazon, and Procter &
Gamble. These companies averaged at least a 35 percent innovation premium over the past five years. But we also learned that
companies such as Salesforce.com (software), Intuitive Surgical
(health care equipment), Hindustan Lever (household products),
Alstom (electrical equipment), and Monsanto (chemicals) have
similar premiums. And as we studied these firms in greater detail,
we learned that they are also very innovative. As we examined
both our list and the BusinessWeek list of innovative companies,
we saw several patterns.
First, we noticed that compared to typical companies they
were far more likely to be led by an innovative founder or a leader
who scored extremely high on the five discovery skills that compose the innovator’s DNA (their average discovery quotient was
in the eighty-eighth percentile, which meant they scored higher
than 88 percent of people taking our discovery skills assessment).
Innovative companies are almost always led by innovative leaders.
Let us say this again: Innovative companies are almost always led by
innovative leaders. The bottom line: if you want innovation, you
need creativity skills within the top management team of your
company. We saw how innovative founders often imprinted their
organizations with their behaviors. For example, Jeff Bezos
personally excels at experimenting, so he helped create institutionalized processes within Amazon to push others to experiment. Similarly, Intuit’s Scott Cook shines at observing, so he
pushes observation at Intuit. Perhaps not surprisingly, we discovered that the DNA of innovative organizations mirrored the DNA
of innovative individuals. In other words, innovative people

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systematically engage in questioning, observing, networking, and
experimenting behaviors to spark new ideas. Similarly, innovative
organizations systematically develop processes that encourage
questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting by employees. Our chapters on building the innovator’s DNA in your
organization and team describe how you too can actively encourage and support others’ innovation efforts.

Why the Ideas in This Book Should Matter to You
Over the last decade, many books on the topic of innovation and
creativity have been written. Some books focus on disruptive innovation, such as Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma
and The Innovator’s Solution. Others, such as Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators (Govindarajan and Trimble), Game Changer (A. G.
Lafley and Ram Charan), and The Entrepreneurial Mindset (Rita
McGrath and Ian MacMillan), examine how organizations, and
organizational leaders, encourage and support innovation. Others look more specifically at product development and innovation
processes within and across firms, such as How Breakthroughs
Happen (Andrew Hargadon) and The Sources of Innovation
(Eric von Hippel). Other books on innovation look at the roles
individuals play in the innovation process within companies,
such as The Ten Faces of Innovation and The Art of Innovation
(both by Tom Kelley of IDEO), or A Whole New Mind (Daniel
Pink). Finally, other books like Creativity in Context (Teresa
Amabile) and Creativity (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) examine
individual creativity and, more specifically, theories and research
about creativity. Our book differs from the others in that it is
focused squarely on individual creativity in the business context
and is based on our study of a large sample of business innovators, including some big-name innovators such as Jeff Bezos
(Amazon.com), Pierre Omidyar (eBay), Michael Lazaridis

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A Disclaimer . . . Sort of
We think it is important to remember three significant points as
you read The Innovator’s DNA. First, engaging in the discovery
skills doesn’t ensure financial success. Throughout the book,
we tell stories of people who were manifestly successful at
innovating. We focus on the success stories because we are all
more naturally drawn to success than failure. However, in our
sample of five hundred innovators, only two-thirds launched
ventures or products that met our criteria of success. Many
were not successful. The innovators developed the right skills—
questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting—that
produced an innovative venture or product, but the result was
not always a financial success. The point is that the discovery
skills we describe are necessary, indeed critical, for generating
innovative business ideas, but they don’t guarantee success.
Second, failure (in a financial sense) often results from not
being vigilant in engaging all discovery skills. The more financially successful innovators in our sample demonstrated a
higher discovery quotient (scored higher on the discovery
skills) than less successful ones. If you fail with an innovation,
it may be that you didn’t ask all the right questions, make all
of the necessary observations, talk to a large enough group
of diverse people, or run the right experiments. Of course, it is
also possible that you did all these things but an even newer
technology emerged or some other bright innovator came up
with an even better idea. Or maybe you just didn’t excel at
executing on the idea or have the resources to compete with
an established firm that imitated your invention. Many factors
can prevent a new product or business idea from gaining
traction in the market. But the better you are at asking the
(continued)

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right questions, engaging in the right observations, eliciting
ideas and feedback through networking with the right people,
and running experiments, the less likely you are to fail.
Third, we spotlight different innovators and innovative companies to illustrate key ideas or principles, but not to set them
up as perfect examples of how to be innovative. Some innovators we studied were “serial innovators,” as they had developed quite a number of innovations over time and appeared
motivated to continue doing so. Others benefitted by being in
the right place at the right time to make a critical observation,
talk to a key person with particularly useful knowledge, or
serendipitously learn from an experiment. They made an
important discovery once, but they might not necessarily be
capable or motivated (perhaps due to financial success) to
continue generating innovative ideas. In similar fashion, we
have found that innovative companies can quickly lose their
innovative prowess, while others can quickly improve it. In
chapter 8, we show that Apple’s innovation prowess (as measured by its innovation premium) dropped dramatically after
Jobs left in 1984, but then jumped up dramatically a few years
after he returned to lead the company. Procter & Gamble was
a solid innovation performer before Lafley took the helm, but
increased its innovation premium by 30 percent under his
leadership. The point is that people and companies can
change and may not always live up to our lofty expectations.

(Research In Motion/BlackBerry), Michael Dell (Dell), Marc
Benioff (Salesforce.com), Niklas Zennström (Skype), Scott Cook
(Intuit), Peter Thiel (PayPal), David Neeleman (JetBlue and Azul
airlines), and so on. The premise of our book is that we explain
how these big names got their “big ideas” and describe a process

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that readers can emulate. We describe in detail five skills that
anyone can master to improve his or her own ability to be an
innovative thinker.
Ask yourself: Am I good at generating innovative business
ideas? Do I know how to find innovative people for my organization? Do I know how to train people to be more creative and
innovative? Some executives respond to the last question by
encouraging employees to think outside the box. But thinking
outside the box is precisely what employees (and executives) are
trying to figure out. We’ve even watched some executives answer
the “How do I think outside the box?” question with another
equally generic (and unhelpful) answer, “Be creative.”
If you find yourself struggling with actionable answers to these
questions, read on to gain a solid grasp of five skills that can make
all the difference when facing your next innovation challenge. All
leaders have problems and opportunities sitting in front of them
for which they have no solution. It might be a new process. It might
be a new product or service. It might be a new business model for
an old business. In every case, the skills you build by putting into
practice the innovator’s DNA may literally save your job, your organization, and perhaps your community. Indeed, we’ve found
that if you want to rise to the highest levels of your organization—
to a business unit manager, president, or CEO position—you need
strong discovery skills. And if you want to lead a truly innovative
organization, you likely will need to excel at those skills.
We hope that The Innovator’s DNA will encourage you to reclaim some of your youthful curiosity. Staying curious keeps us
engaged and our organizations alive.3 Imagine how competitive
your company will be ten years from now without innovators if
its people didn’t find any new ways to improve its processes,
products, or services. Clearly, your company would not survive.
Innovators constitute the core of any company’s, or even country’s, ability to compete.

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How The Innovator’s DNA Unfolds
Like a pocket-sized map in a foreign place, our book serves as a
guide to your innovation journey. The first part (chapters 1
through 6) explains why the innovator’s DNA matters and how
the pieces can combine into a personalized approach to innovation. We put flesh onto the “think different” slogan by explaining
in detail the habits and techniques that allow innovators to think
differently. The chapters in part one give rich detail about how
to master the specific skills that are key to generating novel
ideas—associating, questioning, observing, networking, and
experimenting.
The second part (chapters 7 through 10) amplifies the building blocks of innovation by showing how the discovery skills of
innovators described in part one operate in organizations and
teams. Chapter 7 introduces our ranking of the world’s most innovative companies based on each company’s innovation premium, a market value premium based on investors’ expectations
of future innovations. We also provide a framework for seeing
how the innovator’s DNA works in the world’s most innovative
teams and organizations. We call this the “3P” framework because
it contains the discovery-driven building blocks of highly innovative organizations or teams—people, processes, and philosophies.
Chapter 8 focuses on building-block number one, people, and describes how innovative organizations achieve maximum impact
by actively recruiting, encouraging, and rewarding people who
display strong discovery skills—and blending innovators effectively with folks who have strong execution skills. Chapter 9
shows innovative team and company processes that mirror the five
discovery skills of disruptive innovators. In other words, innovative companies rely on processes to encourage—even require—
their people to engage in questioning, observing, networking,
experimenting, and associating. Chapter 10 focuses on the funda-

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mental philosophies that guide behavior within innovative teams
and organizations. These philosophies not only guide disruptive
innovators but also get imprinted in the organization, giving
people the courage to innovate. Finally, for those interested in
building discovery skills in yourself, your team, and even the next
generation (young people you know), in appendix C we guide you
through a process of taking your innovator’s DNA to the next
level.
We’re delighted that you’re starting or continuing your own
innovation journey. We have watched scores of individuals take
the ideas in this book to heart and who describe how they have
dramatically improved their innovation skills as a result. They
continually confirm that the journey is worth taking. We think
you’ll feel the same way once you’ve finished reading about and
mastering the skills of a disruptive innovator.

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PA R T O N E

Disruptive
Innovation
Starts with
You

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1
The DNA of Disruptive
Innovators
“I want to put a ding in the universe.”
—Steve Jobs, founder and CEO,
Apple Inc.

D

to generate innovative, even
disruptive, business ideas? Do I know how to
find creative people or how to train people to think outside the
box? These questions stump most senior executives, who know
that the ability to innovate is the “secret sauce” of business success.
Unfortunately, most of us know very little about what makes one
person more creative than another. Perhaps for this reason, we
stand in awe of visionary entrepreneurs such as Apple’s Steve Jobs,
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and eBay’s Pierre Omidyar, and innovative
executives like P&G’s A. G. Lafley, Bain & Company’s Orit Gadiesh,
and eBay’s Meg Whitman. How do these people come up with
groundbreaking new ideas? If it were possible to discover the inner
O I KNOW HOW

17

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workings of the masters’ minds, what could the rest of us learn
about how innovation really happens?

Ideas for Innovation
Consider the case of Jobs, who was recently ranked the world’s
number-one best-performing CEO in a study published by
Harvard Business Review.1 You may recall Apple’s famous “Think
Different” ad campaign, whose slogan says it all. The campaign
featured innovators from different fields, including Albert Einstein,
Picasso, Richard Branson, and John Lennon, but Jobs’s face might
easily have been featured among the others. After all, everyone
knows that Jobs is an innovative guy, that he knows how to think
different. But the question is, just how does he do it? Indeed, how
does any innovator think different?
The common answer is that the ability to think creatively is genetic. Most of us believe that some people, like Jobs, are simply
born with creative genes, while others are not. Innovators are supposedly right brained, meaning that they are genetically endowed
with creative abilities. The rest of us are left brained—logical,
linear thinkers, with little or no ability to think creatively.
If you believe this, we’re going to tell you that you are largely
wrong. At least within the realm of business innovation, virtually
everyone has some capacity for creativity and innovative thinking.
Even you. So using the example of Jobs, let’s explore this ability to
think different. How did Jobs come up with some of his innovative
ideas in the past? And what does his journey tell us?
Innovative Idea #1: Personal Computers
Should Be Quiet and Small

One of the key innovations in the Apple II, the computer that
launched Apple, came from Jobs’s decision that it should be quiet.
His conviction resulted, in part, from all the time he’d spent

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studying Zen and meditating.2 He found the noise of a computer
fan distracting. So Jobs was determined that the Apple II would
have no fan, which was a fairly radical notion at the time. Nobody
else had questioned the need for a fan because all computers
required a fan to prevent overheating. Getting rid of the fan
wouldn’t be possible without a different type of power supply that
generated less heat.
So Jobs went on the hunt for someone who could design a new
power supply. Through his network of contacts, he found Rod
Holt, a forty-something, chain-smoking socialist from the Atari
crowd.3 Pushed by Jobs, Holt abandoned the fifty-year-old conventional linear unit technology and created a switching power
supply that revolutionized the way power was delivered to electronics products. Jobs’s pursuit of quiet and Holt’s ability to deliver an innovative power supply that didn’t need a fan made the
Apple II the quietest and smallest personal computer ever made
(a smaller computer was possible because it didn’t need extra space
for the fan).
Had Jobs never asked, “Why does a computer need a fan?” and
“How do we keep a computer cool without a fan?” the Apple computer as we know it would not exist.
Innovative Idea #2: The Macintosh User Interface,
Operating System, and Mouse

The seed for the Macintosh, with its revolutionary operating
system, was planted when Jobs visited Xerox PARC in 1979. Xerox,
the copier company, created the Palo Alto Research Center
(PARC), a research lab charged with designing the office of the
future. Jobs wrangled a visit to PARC in exchange for offering
Xerox an opportunity to invest in Apple. Xerox didn’t know how
to capitalize on the exciting things going on at PARC, but Jobs did.
Jobs carefully observed the PARC computer screen filled with
icons, pull-down menus, and overlapping windows—all controlled

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by the click of a mouse. “What we saw was incomplete and flawed,”
Jobs said,“but the germ of the idea was there . . . within ten minutes
it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this.”4 He
spent the next five years at Apple leading the design team that would
produce the Macintosh computer, the first personal computer with
a graphical user interface (GUI) and mouse. Oh, and he saw something else during the PARC visit. He got his first taste of objectoriented programming, which became the key to the OSX operating
system that Apple acquired from Jobs’s other start-up, NeXT Computers. What if Jobs had never visited Xerox PARC to observe what
was going on there?
Innovative Idea #3: Desktop Publishing on the Mac

The Macintosh, with its LaserWriter printer, was the first computer
to bring desktop publishing to the masses. Jobs claims that the
“beautiful typography” available on the Macintosh would never
have been introduced if he hadn’t dropped in on a calligraphy class
at Reed College in Oregon. Says Jobs:
Reed College offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster,
every label on every drawer, was beautifully handcalligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have
to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy
class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and
san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space
between different letter combinations, about what makes
great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I
found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any
practical application in my life. But ten years later, when
we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all
came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It

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was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had
never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac
would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac,
it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.5
What if Jobs hadn’t decided to drop in on the calligraphy classes
when he had dropped out of college?
So what do we learn from Jobs’s ability to think different? Well,
first we see that his innovative ideas didn’t spring fully formed
from his head, as if they were a gift from the Idea Fairy. When we
examine the origins of these ideas, we typically find that the catalyst was: (1) a question that challenged the status quo, (2) an observation of a technology, company, or customer, (3) an experience
or experiment where he was trying out something new, or (4) a
conversation with someone who alerted him to an important piece
of knowledge or opportunity. In fact, by carefully examining Jobs’s
behaviors and, specifically, how those behaviors brought in new diverse knowledge that triggered an innovative idea, we can trace his
innovative ideas to their source.
What is the moral of this story? We want to convince you that
creativity is not just a genetic endowment and not just a cognitive
skill. Rather, we’ve learned that creative ideas spring from behavioral skills that you, too, can acquire to catalyze innovative ideas in
yourself and in others.

What Makes Innovators Different?
So what makes innovators different from the rest of us? Most of us
believe this question has been answered. It’s a genetic endowment.
Some people are right brained, which allows them to be more
intuitive and divergent thinkers. Either you have it or you don’t.
But does research really support this idea? Our research confirms

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others’ work that creativity skills are not simply genetic traits endowed at birth, but that they can be developed. In fact, the most
comprehensive study confirming this was done by a group of researchers, Merton Reznikoff, George Domino, Carolyn Bridges,
and Merton Honeymon, who studied creative abilities in 117 pairs
of identical and fraternal twins. Testing twins aged fifteen to
twenty-two, they found that only about 30 percent of the performance of identical twins on a battery of ten creativity tests
could be attributed to genetics.6 In contrast, roughly 80 percent to
85 percent of the twins’ performance on general intelligence (IQ)
tests could be attributed to genetics.7 So general intelligence (at
least the way scientists measure it) is basically a genetic
endowment, but creativity is not. Nurture trumps nature as far as
creativity goes. Six other creativity studies of identical twins confirm the Reznikoff et al. result: roughly 25 percent to 40 percent of
what we do innovatively stems from genetics.8 That means that
roughly two-thirds of our innovation skills still come through
learning—from first understanding the skill, then practicing it,
and ultimately gaining confidence in our capacity to create.
This is one reason that individuals who grow up in societies
that promote community versus individualism and hierarchy over
merit—such as Japan, China, Korea, and many Arab nations—are
less likely to creatively challenge the status quo and turn out innovations (or win Nobel prizes). To be sure, many innovators in
our study seemed genetically gifted. But more importantly, they
often described how they acquired innovation skills from role
models who made it “safe” as well as exciting to discover new ways
of doing things.
If innovators can be made and not just born, how then do
they come up with great new ideas? Our research on roughly
five hundred innovators compared to roughly five thousand executives led us to identify five discovery skills that distinguish
innovators from typical executives (for detail on the research

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methods, see appendix B). First and foremost, innovators count
on a cognitive skill that we call “associational thinking” or simply “associating.” Associating happens as the brain tries to synthesize and make sense of novel inputs. It helps innovators
discover new directions by making connections across seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas. Innovative breakthroughs often happen at the intersection of diverse disciplines
and fields. Author Frans Johanssen described this phenomenon as
“the Medici effect,” referring to the creative explosion in Florence
when the Medici family brought together creators from a wide
range of disciplines—sculptors, scientist, poets, philosophers,
painters, and architects. As these individuals connected, they
created new ideas at the intersection of their respective fields,
thereby spawning the Renaissance, one of the most innovative eras
in history. Put simply, innovative thinkers connect fields, problems, or ideas that others find unrelated.
The other four discovery skills trigger associational thinking
by helping innovators increase their stock of building-block ideas
from which innovative ideas spring. Specifically, innovators engage
the following behavioral skills more frequently:
Questioning. Innovators are consummate 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. We 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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Observing. Innovators are also intense observers. They carefully watch the world around them—including customers,
products, services, technologies, and companies—and 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.
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). Fascinated by their operation, Jobs bought Industrial Light & Magic for $10 million,
renamed it Pixar, and eventually took it public for $1 billion.
Had he never chatted with Kay, he would never have wound
up purchasing Pixar, and the world might never have thrilled
to wonderful animated films like Toy Story,WALL-E, and Up.
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

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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.
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.

The Courage to Innovate
Why do innovators question, observe, network, and experiment
more than typical executives? As we examined what motivates
them, we discovered 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. Jobs wants to
“put a ding in the universe.” Google cofounder Larry Page has said
he’s out to “change the world.” These innovators steer entirely clear
of a common cognitive trap called the status quo bias—the tendency to prefer an existing state of affairs to alternative ones. Most
of us simply accept the status quo. We may even like routine and
prefer not to rock the boat. We adhere to the saying, “if it ain’t
broke, don’t fix it,” while not really questioning whether “it” is
“broke.” In contrast, innovators see many things as “broke.” And
they want to fix them.
How do innovators break the status quo? One way is to refuse
to be dictated by other people’s schedules. Just glance at an
innovative executive’s typical calendar and you will find a radically
different schedule compared to less inventive executives. We found
that innovative entrepreneurs (who are also CEOs) spend 50 percent
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record. That translated into spending almost one more day each
week on discovery activities. They understand that fulfilling their
dreams to change the world means they’ve got to spend a significant amount of time trying to discover how to change the world.
And having the courage to innovate means that they are actively
looking for opportunities to change the world.
Embracing a mission for change makes it much easier to take
smart risks, make mistakes, and most of all, learn quickly from
them. Most innovative entrepreneurs we studied felt that mistakes
are nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, they are an expected cost of
doing business. “If the people running Amazon.com don’t make
some significant mistakes,” Jeff Bezos told us, “then we won’t be
doing a good job for our shareholders because we won’t be swinging for the fences.” In short, 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.
In summary, the DNA of innovators—or the code for
generating innovative ideas—is expressed in the model shown in
figure 1-1. 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. But a more critical reason is that
they more frequently engage in the behavioral skills of questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting. These are the catalysts for associational thinking. Of course, the next question is,
why do some people engage these four skills more than others?
The answer is that they have the courage to innovate. They are
willing to embrace a mission for change and take risks to make
change happen. The bottom line is that to improve your ability to
generate innovative ideas, you need to practice associational
thinking and more frequently engage in questioning, observing,

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FIGURE 1-1

The innovator’s DNA model for generating innovative ideas

Courage to
innovate

Behavioral
skills

Cognitive skill to
synthesize novel inputs

Questioning

Challenging
the status quo
Taking risks

Observing
Associational
thinking

Innovative
business
idea

Networking

Experimenting

networking, and experimenting. That will likely only happen if
you can somehow cultivate the courage to innovate.
As innovators actively engage in their discovery skills over a lifetime, they build discovery habits, and they become defined by them.
They grow increasingly confident in their ability to discover what’s
next, and they believe deeply that generating creative insights is their
job. It is not something to delegate to someone else. As A. G. Lafley
declared, “innovation is the central job of every leader—business
unit managers, functional leaders, and the CEO.”9

The Innovator’s DNA
We’ve just told you that the ability to be innovative is not based
primarily on genetics. At the same time, we’re using the DNA
metaphor to describe the inner workings of innovators, which suggests that it is. Bear with us for a moment. (And welcome to the
world of innovation, where the ability to synthesize two seemingly
opposing ideas is the type of associating that produces novel

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insights.) Recent developments in the field of gene therapy show
that it is possible to modify and strengthen your physical DNA,
for example, to help ward off diseases.10 Likewise, it is metaphorically possible to strengthen your personal innovator’s DNA. Let
us provide an illustration.
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 idea.
During that week, you come up with ideas alone, just thinking
in your room. By contrast, your twin (1) talks with ten people—
including 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 and takes them apart; (4) shows a prototype he’s built
to five people, and (5) asks “What if I tried this?” and “What
would make this not work?” at least ten times each day during
these networking, observing, and experimenting activities. Who
do you bet will come up with the more innovative (and usable)
idea? My guess is that you’d bet on your twin, and not because
he has better natural (genetic) creative abilities. Of course, the
anchor weight of genetics is still there, but it is not the dominant
predictor. People can learn to more capably come up with innovative solutions to problems by acting in the way that your
twin did.
As figure 1-2 shows, innovative entrepreneurs rarely display
across-the-board strength in observing, experimenting, and networking, and actually don’t need to. All of the high-profile innovative entrepreneurs in our study scored above the seventieth
percentile in associating and questioning. The innovators seemed
to hold these two discovery skills more universally. But the innovators we studied didn’t need world-class strength in the other
behaviors. It certainly helped if they excelled at one of the four
skills and were strong in at least two. If you hope to be a better

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Discovery Skill Strengths Differ for
Disruptive Innovators
To understand that innovative entrepreneurs develop and use
different skills, look at figure 1-2. 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). 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.
FIGURE 1-2

High-profile innovators’ discovery skills profile
100
90

Percentile rank

80
70

Mike Lazaridis
Pierre Omidyar
Scott Cook
Michael Dell
Noninnovators

60
50
40
30
20
10

g
or
ki n
Ne
tw

en
tin
g
Ex

pe

rim

er
vin
g
O
bs

ng
ni
io
st
Q
ue

As

so

cia
t

in
g

0

As you can see, the pattern for each innovative entrepreneur is
different. For example, Omidyar is much more likely to acquire
his ideas through questioning (ninety-fifty percentile) and
(continued)

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observing (eighty-seventh percentile), Dell through experimenting (ninetieth percentile) and networking (ninety-eighth
percentile), Cook through observing (eighty-eighth percentile)
and questioning (eighty-third percentile), and Lazaridis through
questioning (ninety-sixth percentile) and networking (ninetyeighth percentile). The point is that each of these innovative
entrepreneurs did not score high on all five of the discovery
skills. They each combined the discovery skills uniquely to
forge new insights. Just as each person’s physical DNA is
unique, an innovator’s DNA comprises a unique combination
of skills and behaviors.

innovator, you will need to figure out which of these skills you can
improve and which can be distinguishing skills to help you generate innovative ideas.

Delivery Skills: Why Most Senior Executives
Don’t Think Different
We’ve spent the past eight years interviewing scores of senior
executives—mostly at large companies—asking them to describe
the most novel and valuable strategic insights that they had generated during their careers. Somewhat surprisingly, we found that
top executives rarely mentioned an innovative business idea that
they had personally generated. They were extremely intelligent and
talented individuals who were accomplished at delivering results,
but they didn’t have much direct, personal experience with generating innovative business ideas.
In contrast to innovators who seek to fundamentally change
existing business models, products, or processes, most senior
executives work hard to efficiently deliver the next thing that
should be done given the existing business model. That is, they

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I’m Not Steve Jobs . . . Is This Relevant?
OK, so you’re not Steve Jobs. Or Jeff Bezos. Or any other famous business innovator. But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn
from these innovators. You can get better at innovating, even if
most of your innovations are somewhat incremental in nature.
We’ve seen it happen, and we’ve seen that it can make a difference. We’ve seen a pharmaceutical executive practice a
questioning technique (see chapter 3) each day to identify key
strategic issues facing his division. After three months, his boss
told him that he’d become the most effective strategic thinker
on his team. Within six months, he was promoted to a corporate
strategic planning job. “I just improved my ability to ask questions,” he told us. We’ve seen MBA students in our classes use
the observing, networking, and experimenting techniques to
generate entrepreneurial business ideas. One got the idea for
launching a company that uses bacteria to eat pollution from
networking with someone he met at a neighborhood barbeque.
Another observed that the best English speakers in Brazil were
people who watched American movies and television. So he
launched a company that sells software that helps people learn
English by watching movies. Many innovative ideas may seem
small, such as a new process for effectively screening job recruits or a better way to build customer loyalty, but they are
valuable new ideas nonetheless. And if you come up with
enough of them, they will definitely help you advance in your
career. The point is this: you don’t have to be Steve Jobs to
generate innovative ideas for your business.

work inside the box. They shine at converting a vision or goal into
the specific tasks to achieve the defined goal. They organize work
and conscientiously execute logical, detailed, data-driven plans of
action. In short, most executives excel at execution, including the

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following four delivery skills: analyzing, planning, detail-oriented
implementing, and disciplined executing. (We’ll say more about
these skills later in the chapter and in chapter 8, but for now we
need only note that they are critical for delivering results and
translating an innovative idea into reality.)
Many innovators realize that they are deficient in these critical
skills and, consequently, try to team up with others who possess
them. For example, eBay founder Omidyar quickly recognized the
need for execution skills, so he invited Jeff Skoll, a Stanford MBA,
and Meg Whitman, a Harvard MBA, to join him. “Jeff Skoll and I
had very complementary skills,” Omidyar told us. “I’d say I did
more of the creative work developing the product and solving
problems around the product, while Jeff was involved in the more
analytical and practical side of things. He was the one who would
listen to an idea of mine and then say, ‘Ok, let’s figure out how to
get this done.’” Skoll and Whitman professionalized the eBay Web
site, added fixed-price auctions, drove international expansion, developed new categories such as autos, and integrated important
capabilities such as PayPal.
Why do most senior executives excel in the delivery skills,
but are only above average in discovery skills? It is vital to understand that the skills critical to an organization’s success vary
systematically throughout the business life cycle. (See figure 1-4).
For example, in the start-up phase of an innovative venture, the
founders are obviously more discovery-driven and entrepreneurial. Discovery skills are crucial early in the business life cycle
because the company’s key task is to generate new business ideas
worth pursuing. Thus, discovery (exploration) skills are highly
valued at this stage and delivery (execution) skills are secondary. However, once innovative entrepreneurs come up with a
promising new business idea and then shape that idea into a
bona fide business opportunity, the company begins to grow and
then must pay attention to building the processes necessary to
scale the idea.

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The Discovery and Delivery Skills Matrix:
How Innovators Stack Up
To test the assertion that innovative executives have a different
set of skills than typical executives, we used our innovator’s DNA
assessment to measure the percentile rank of a sample of highprofile innovative entrepreneurs (founder CEOs of companies
on BusinessWeek’s list of the top one hundred most innovative
companies) on both the five discovery skills (associating, questioning, observing, networking, experimenting) and the four delivery or execution skills: analyzing, planning, detail-oriented
implementing, and self-disciplined executing. We averaged
their percentile rank scores across the five discovery skills to
get an overall percentile rank, and then did the same thing
across the four delivery skills to get an overall percentile rank.
We refer to the overall percentile rank across the five discovery
skills as the “discovery quotient” or DQ. While intellectual
quotient (or IQ) tests are designed to measure general intelligence and emotional quotient (or EQ) assessments measure
emotional intelligence (ability to identify, assess, and control the
emotions of ourselves and others), discovery quotient (DQ) is
designed to measure our ability to discover ideas for new ventures, products, and processes.
Figure 1-3 shows that the high-profile innovative entrepreneurs scored in the eighty-eighth percentile on discovery skills,
but only scored in the fifty-sixth percentile on delivery skills. In
short, they were just average at execution. We then conducted
the same analysis for a sample of nonfounder CEOs (executives
who had never started a new business). We found that most
senior executives in large organizations were the mirror image
of innovative entrepreneurs: they scored around the eightieth
percentile on delivery skills, while scoring only above average on
(continued)

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FIGURE 1-3

Discovery-delivery skills matrix
100

(Percentile score)

Discovery skills

Founder CEOs
at innovative
companies

gh d
Hi nce
la
ba

Discoverydriven
75

Nonfounder
CEOs at
average
companies

50

Business unit
managers
Functional
Managers

25

Deliverydriven

w d
Lo nce
la
a
b
0

25

50

75

100

Delivery skills
(Percentile score)

discovery skills (sixty-second percentile). In short, they are selected primarily for their execution skills. This focus on execution
is even more pronounced in business unit managers and functional managers, who are worse at discovery than typical CEOs.
This data shows that innovative organizations are led by individuals with a very high DQ. It also shows that even within an
average organization, discovery skills tend to distinguish those
who make it to the highest levels of the organization. So if you
want to move up, you’d better learn how to innovate.

During the growth stage, the innovative entrepreneur may
well leave the company, either because she has no interest in scaling the idea (which involves boring and routine work, at least to
her) or because she does not have the skills to manage effectively
in a large organization. Innovative entrepreneurs are often

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The DNA of Disruptive Innovators

FIGURE 1-4

The business and executive skill life cycles

Mature
stage

Decline
stage

Growth
stage
Start-up
stage
Organization • Develop and
launch new
imperative
business idea

Organization
primarily
rewards

Discovery
skills

Organization
secondarily
rewards

Delivery
skills

• Scale the new
business idea
• Build processes
to execute
consistently and
systematically

• Exploit resources
and capabilities
generated during
growth stage.

Delivery
skills

Delivery
skills

Discovery
skills

Discovery
skills

• Harvest,
find, or
develop
other new
business
ideas

Delivery
skills still
dominate but
discovery
skills
increase in
importance

described as poor managers because they lack the ability to follow through on their new business ideas and are often irrationally overconfident in them. Moreover, they are more likely to
make decisions based on hunches and personal biases rather
than data-driven analysis.11 Not surprisingly, the conventional
prescription for these problems is to replace the entrepreneurs
with professional managers—individuals with proven skills at
delivering results. At this point in the business life cycle, professional managers who are better equipped to scale the business
often replace the entrepreneur founders. When such replacement
occurs, however, key discovery skills walk away from the top management team.

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With the founder entrepreneur out of the picture, the ensuing
growth and maturation stage of the business life cycle begins. In
these stages, managers generally make it to the top of the management pyramid through great execution. This may involve generating incremental (sustaining) innovations for existing
customers, but the focus is on execution, not building new businesses. Surprisingly few companies in this stage pay systematic attention to the selection or promotion of people with strong
discovery skills. As this happens, the lack of discovery skills at the
top becomes even more glaring, but it is still not necessarily obvious. (Contrast these common practices with those of Amazon
founder Bezos, who systematically asks any new hire, including
senior executives, to “tell me about something that you have invented.” Bezos wants to hire people with an inventive attitude—in
other words, people like himself.)
Eventually, for most organizations, the initial innovations that
created the business in the first place complete their life cycle.
Growth stalls as the business hits the downward inflection point
in the well-known S curve. These mature and declining organizations are typically dominated by executives with excellent delivery
skills. Meanwhile, investors demand new growth businesses, but
senior executive teams can’t seem to find them because the management ranks are dominated by folks with strong delivery skills.
With discovery skills largely absent from the top management
team, it becomes increasingly difficult to find new business opportunities to fuel new company growth. The company once again
starts to see the imperative for discovery skills.
In sharp contrast, when entrepreneur founders stay through
the growth stage, the company significantly outperforms its peers
in growth and profitability.12 An entrepreneurial founder is far
more likely to surround herself with executives who are good at
discovery, or who at least understand discovery. Could Apple have
built new businesses in music (iTunes and iPod) and phones

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(iPhone) on top of an older computer business without the return
of Jobs? We doubt it.
The key point here is that large companies typically fail at disruptive innovation because the top management team is dominated by individuals who have been selected for delivery skills, not
discovery skills. As a result, most executives at large organizations
don’t know how to think different. It isn’t something that they
learn within their company, and it certainly isn’t something they
are taught in business school. Business schools teach people how
to be deliverers, not discoverers.
For a moment, consider your company’s track record of rewarding and promoting discovery skills. Does your company actively screen for people who have strong discovery skills? Does
your company regularly reward discovery skills through annual
performance assessments? If the answers are no, then it is likely
that a severe discovery skill deficit exists at the top ranks of management in your company.

You Can Learn to Think Different
In this chapter, we’ve tried to convince you that creativity is not a
just a genetic predisposition; it is an active endeavor. Apple’s slogan “Think Different” is inspiring but incomplete. Innovators must
consistently act different to think different. We acknowledge that
genetics are at work within innovators, and that some have superior
natural ability at associational thinking. However, even if two individuals have the same genetic creative ability, one will be more successful at creative problem solving if he or she more frequently engages
in the discovery skills we have identified. By understanding—and
engaging in—the five discovery skills, we believe that you can find
ways to more successfully develop the creative spark within yourself and others. Read on as we describe how to master the five discovery skills in order to become a more innovative thinker.

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Discovery and Delivery Skills Quiz:
What’s Your Profile?
To get a quick snapshot of your discovery-delivery skills profile,
take the following self-assessment survey (1 = strongly disagree; 2 = somewhat disagree; 3 = neither agree nor disagree;
4 = somewhat agree; 5 = strongly agree). Remember to answer
based on your actual behaviors, not what you would like to do.
1. Frequently, my ideas or perspectives diverge radically
from others’ perspectives.
2. I am very careful to avoid making any mistakes in my work.
3. I regularly ask questions that challenge the status quo.
4. I am extremely well organized at work.
5. New ideas often come to me when I am directly observing how people interact with products and services.
6. I must have everything finished “just right” when completing a work assignment.
7. I often find solutions to problems by drawing on solutions or ideas developed in other industries, fields, or
disciplines.
8. I never jump into new projects and ventures and act
quickly without carefully thinking through all of the issues.
9. I frequently experiment to create new ways of doing
things.
10. I always follow through to complete a task, no matter
what the obstacles.
11. I regularly talk with a diverse set of people (e.g., from
different business functions, organizations, industries,
geographies, etc.) to find and refine new ideas.

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12. I excel at breaking down a goal or plan into the micro
tasks required to achieve it.
13. I attend conferences (on my areas of expertise as well
as unrelated areas) to meet new people and understand
what issues are facing them.
14. I pay careful attention to details at work to ensure that
nothing is overlooked.
15. I actively seek to identify emerging trends by reading
books, articles, magazines, blogs, and so on.
16. I hold myself and others strictly accountable for getting
results.
17. I frequently ask “what if” questions that provoke exploration of new possibilities and frontiers.
18. I consistently follow through on all commitments and
finish what I’ve started.
19. I regularly observe the activities of customers, suppliers,
or other organizations to get new ideas.
20. I consistently create detailed plans to get work done.
To score your survey:
Add your score on the odd-numbered items. You score
very high on discovery skills if your total score is 45 or above,
high on discovery if your score is 40–45, moderate to high on
discovery if your score is between 35 and 40, moderate to low
if you score 29–34; you score low on discovery if your score is
28 or less.
Add your score on the even-numbered items. You score
very high on delivery skills if your total score is 45 or above,
high on delivery if your score is 40–45, moderate to high on
delivery if your score is between 35 and 40, moderate to low
(continued)

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if you score 29–34; you score low on delivery if your score is
28 or less.
We have drawn this short survey from a more systematic
seventy-item assessment (either a self-assessment or a 360degree assessment) that we have developed to assess an individual’s discovery skills and delivery skills. You can do this
assessment through our Web site at http://www.Innovators
DNA.com. Should you decide to complete an assessment, you
will receive a development guide to walk you through your results and help you design a skill development plan. Your assessment will provide you with your DQ and percentile data
for each discovery and delivery skill to compare your scores
with the over five thousand executives and innovators in our
dataset.

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Discovery Skill #1
Associating
“Creativity is connecting things.”
—Steve Jobs, founder and CEO,
Apple Inc.

I

NNOVATORS 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.
To illustrate how associations produce innovative business
ideas, consider how Marc Benioff came up with the idea for
Salesforce.com, now a $13 billion software company. Benioff ’s
41

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experience with technology and software began when, as a
fifteen-year-old, he built a small software company, Liberty
Software, writing computer games (like “How to Juggle”) on his
Commodore 64. As a computer science and entrepreneurship undergraduate, Benioff worked summers at Apple during the buildup and launch of the first Mac, learning firsthand what it meant to
work in a think-different world.
After graduation, Benioff joined Oracle, then a small start-up.
By the time Benioff was twenty-five, he was leading Oracle’s entire
direct-marketing division and was beginning to see several streams
of opportunity emerging on the Internet.“The nature of being successful with software is you always have to be looking for the next
thing, so you have to condition your mind to think that way,”
Benioff told us.“I’ve seen a lot of different technological shifts over
the last twenty-five years, so as I was sitting at my desk at Oracle in
the late nineties and watching the emergence of Amazon.com and
eBay . . . it felt like something significant was on the horizon.”
Benioff decided it was time to think more deeply about the
changing technological landscape—and his own career. So he took
a sabbatical that started with a trip to India where he met a variety
of diverse people, including spiritual leader and humanitarian,
Mata Amritanandamayi (who helped strengthen his commitment
to doing well and doing good in business). Benioff ’s next stop on
this global journey was Hawaii, where he discussed various ideas
for new businesses with an assortment of entrepreneurs and
friends. While swimming with dolphins in the Pacific Ocean, the
fundamental epiphany for Salesforce.com surfaced. He reflected: “I
asked myself ‘Why aren’t all enterprise software applications built
like Amazon and eBay? Why are we still loading and upgrading software the way that we have been doing all this time when we now
have the Internet?’ And that was a fundamental breakthrough for
me, asking those questions. And that’s the genesis of Salesforce. It’s
basically enterprise software meets Amazon.”

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Benioff ’s synthesis of novel inputs or association—“enterprise
software meets Amazon”—challenged the industry tradition of
selling software on CD-ROMs and engaging companies in lengthy,
customized (and expensive) installation processes, and instead focused on delivering software as a service over the Internet. That
way, the software would be available 24/7, and companies would
avoid all the costs and shutdowns associated with ongoing, largescale IT system installations and upgrades. Given his substantial
experience in sales and marketing at Oracle, Benioff felt that providing software services for managing a sales force and customer
relations carried huge potential for small and medium-sized businesses that couldn’t afford customized enterprise software. Thus,
Salesforce.com was born.
Benioff ’s vision emerged from years of significant software
industry experience combined with countless questions, observations, explorations, and conversations that ultimately helped him
bring together things that had never been connected before. He
borrowed elements of the Amazon business model and built a different one based on a software system that companies would pay
for as they used it, instead of paying for all of the software systems
before they used them (as most software providers did). It was truly
revolutionary as it launched an era of “cloud computing” that
seems obvious now, but was far from obvious then.
Ever the juggler with a mind hooked on “combinatorial play”
(or playing around with new associations), Benioff and his Salesforce.com team have continued the innovation journey. He
explained that pre-Salesforce.com, his critical question was “Why
isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon?” but post-Salesforce.com,
a different question slowly took its place, “Why isn’t all enterprise
software (including Salesforce.com) like Facebook?” Benioff and his
team hotly pursued the answer and invented Chatter, a new social
software application that has been referred to as “Facebook for businesses.” Chatter takes the best of Facebook and Twitter and applies

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it to enterprise collaboration (think of it as “Facebook and Twitter
meet enterprise software,” just as “enterprise software met Amazon”
at Salesforce.com’s genesis).
Chatter uses new ways of sharing information such as feeds and
groups, so that without any effort, people can see what individuals and teams are focusing on, how projects are progressing,
and what deals are closing. It changes the way companies collaborate on product development, customer acquisition, and content
creation by making it easy for everyone to see what everyone else
is doing. At companies using Chatter, e-mail in-boxes have shrunk
dramatically (by 43 percent at Salesforce.com) because the majority of communications are now status updates and feeds in Chatter.
“Employees now follow accounts, and updates are automatically
broadcast to them in real-time via Chatter,” Benioff told us. “This
is the true power of Chatter—bringing to light the most important people and ideas that move our companies forward. I call this
social intelligence, and it’s giving everyone access to the people, the
knowledge, and the insight they need to make a difference.”

Associating: What It Is
The great innovative entrepreneur Walt Disney once described his
role in the company he founded as creative catalyst. By that he
meant that while he himself didn’t actually do the drawings for the
wonderful animated films or build the giant Matterhorn replica
for Disneyland, he did put ideas together in ways that sparked creative insights throughout the company. One day, a little boy was
curious about Disney’s job, and Disney vividly recalled the conversation: “I was stumped one day when a little boy asked, ‘Do you
draw Mickey Mouse?’ I had to admit I do not draw any more.
‘Then you think up all the jokes and ideas?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t do
that.’ Finally, he looked at me and said, ‘Mr. Disney, just what do
you do?’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I think of myself as a little bee. I go from

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one area of the studio to another and gather pollen and sort of
stimulate everybody.’ I guess that’s the job I do.”1 Not only did Disney spark others’ ideas, he sparked his own as well by putting himself at the intersection of others’ experiences. Over time, Disney’s
associational insights—including a string of industry firsts such
as joining animation with full-length movies and putting themes
into amusement parks—changed the face of entertainment.
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.”2 This is how innovators think different, or what we
call associating,3 a cognitive skill at the core of the innovator’s
DNA. In this chapter, we look more deeply into the workings of
associational thinking and offer some techniques for developing
this cognitive ability.

Associating: Where It Happens
Innovative ideas flourish at the intersection of diverse experience,
whether it be others’ or our own. Throughout history, great ideas
have emerged from these crossroads of culture and experience.
Much like the twelve major streets of traffic converging on the
accident-prone circular road surrounding the Arc de Triomphe in
Paris, the more diverse our crossroads of experience, the more
likely a serendipitous synthesis of the surprising will occur. Put
simply, innovators intentionally maneuver themselves into the
intersection, where diverse experiences flourish and foster the

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discovery of new insights. As we mentioned in chapter 1, Frans
Johansson coined the term “Medici effect”4 to describe the spark
that occurs in a geographic space or market space where a combination of novel ideas coalesce into something quite surprising.
Such Medici effects have occurred throughout history, ancient and
contemporary.
For example, historians often refer to the eighth to thirteenth
centuries of the Islamic world as the Islamic “renaissance” or
“golden age.” Centuries before the Italian Renaissance, Baghdad
attracted the best scholars from the Muslim world. Cairo, Damascus, Tunis, and Cordoba were also influential intellectual hubs.
Islamic explorers traveled to the edges of the known world and
beyond. Mecca served not only as a religious center, but also as a
key intersection for multinational merchant traders coming from
the far western regions of the Mediterranean to the far eastern
reaches of India. This Islamic renaissance produced significant
innovations, many of which are relevant today, including the underlying principles and ingredients of lipstick, suntan lotion, thermometers, ethanol, underarm deodorant, tooth bleaching,
torpedoes, fireproof clothing, and charitable trusts.5
The Medici effect occurred in the Islamic and Italian renaissances, but it has also happened in modern times and in many
places around the world. For example, Silicon Valley in the 1960s
was anything but silicon. Yet, by the 1970s, all that had changed
and technology innovation flourished during its renaissance
decades of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Elsewhere in the world,
countries and communities are actively attempting to create their
own intersections of people with expertise in different fields to
spark creative new ideas. China, for example, has bet substantial
resources on its innovation future to the extent that the rest of
the world believes that China is on track to become the world’s
most innovative country by 2020. In our work with the creative
industries and social innovation sectors in China (like so many

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other sectors as well), we have found that they have dotted the land
with artistic and social innovation incubators where ideas see not
only the light of day, but the light of practice also.
The Medici effect also crops up in the many so-called “ideas
conferences” that are flourishing—conferences such as the World
Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland; the
Aspen Ideas Festival; and TED (Technology Entertainment and
Design) conferences, where diverse people join in a conscious
attempt to cross-pollinate ideas and perspectives. Let’s explore the
power of TED. People go to these conferences to rub elbows and
exchange ideas with extraordinary people—those who are well
known and those who aren’t. If you’ve never been to TED, take a
look at its Web site to get a glimpse of how it creates a Medici effect
year after year, and now in geography after geography (from
TEDxTelAviv to TEDxRamallah to TEDxYourTown). A few of
our personal TED favorites are Sir Ken Robinson questioning
the foundation of educational systems, Kaki King experimenting far beyond what a guitar was originally intended to do, and
David Gallo observing the incredible surprises of the deep sea
(including the unexpected talents of squids). TED’s underlying
beauty springs from the intentional diversity of participants and
presentations. This diversity forms the foundation for innovators
to potentially connect the unconnected.
Innovators in our research not only frequented places like TED,
but literally constructed a TED in their heads through an
intentional depth and diversity of life experience, creating a
personal Medici effect. For them, TED-like conferences were icing
on a cake that they had already baked by actively questioning,
observing, networking, and experimenting throughout their lives.
This incredible foundation of deep and diverse experience fueled
their associational thinking far beyond that of noninnovators.
Look at PepsiCo chairman and CEO Indra Nooyi’s life to get a
glimpse of where her TED in the head comes from.

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Nooyi was born to a middle-class family in Madras (now
Chennai), where she often sat with her mother and sister “thinking big thoughts”; she played girls’ cricket avidly and was lead guitarist in an all-girl rock band (it’s no surprise that she still performs
on stage at PepsiCo events). She finished a multidisciplinary undergraduate degree in chemistry, physics, and math before getting
her MBA in Calcutta. Nooyi then worked in the textile industry
(Tootal) and consumer products industry (Johnson & Johnson)
before getting a master’s of public and private management at Yale.
After graduation, she shifted to the consulting industry (Boston
Consulting Group) before doing a strategic stint in the electrical
power industry (ABB), ultimately arriving at PepsiCo, where she
became its first woman CEO.
Nooyi’s diverse professional and personal experience convinced
her that people, and especially CEOs, must “be willing to think disruptively.” She did exactly that for the 2010 Super Bowl. Instead of
spending $20 million on two sixty-second television ad slots,
Nooyi took an entirely different approach, “Pepsi Refresh,” emerging from a question she constantly asks: “How can we do better by
doing better?” Pepsi Refresh invites people to submit ideas on how
to “refresh” their communities, making them a better place to live.
Each month, the Web site accepts a thousand ideas about arts and
culture, health, education, and so on. Online voting produces winning ideas, with grants ranging from $5,000 to $250,000. In 2010
alone, PepsiCo allocated $1.3 million each month to Refresh projects based on over 45 million votes cast. Pepsi Refresh’s Facebook
numbers also topped 1 million by the end of 2010, and PepsiCo is
now rolling out the program globally.

Associating: How It Works
To better grasp how associating works and why some people might
excel at it more than others, it is important to understand how the
brain works. The brain doesn’t store information as a dictionary

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does, alphabetically with theater under T. Instead, while theater
will associate with T, it will also associate with all of the other
knowledge stored in the brain that the brain associates with it.
Some associations with theater will seem logical, such as Broadway,
showtime, or intermission, while others may be less obvious, such
as kissing, acting career, or anxiety (perhaps due to a botched theater performance during high school). The more diverse knowledge the brain possesses, the more connections it can make when
given fresh inputs of knowledge, and fresh inputs trigger the associations that lead to novel ideas. Scott Cook, founder and CEO of
Intuit, describes these unexpected associations as “powerful and
essential supplements to data” when working through a problem.
Such analogies (or associations) are critical creative tools to help
him generate strategic insights. When the brain is actively absorbing new knowledge, it is more likely to trigger connections between
ideas (thus creating a wider web of neural connections) as it toils
to synthesize novel inputs. Accordingly, the associating “muscle”
can also be developed through the active practice of questioning,
observing, networking, and experimenting.
In our research, every high-profile innovator excelled at associating (scoring at the seventieth percentile or higher on the innovator’s DNA assessment), with process inventors showing slightly
less associational skill than other inventors (yet still far more than
noninnovators). (See figure 2-1.)
Why were all innovators so much better at associating than
noninnovators? Our analysis found that the best predictor of
excellent associating skills was how often people engaged in the
other discovery skills—questioning, observing, networking, and
experimenting. For example, Benioff got the initial idea for Chatter as he was asking, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook and Twitter?” Research In Motion founder Lazaridis got the
idea for the BlackBerry at a conference as he listened to someone
talk about future trends in wireless data transfers. Starbucks
founder Schultz got the idea for Starbucks as he was observing

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FIGURE 2-1

Comparison of associating skills for different types of
innovators and noninnovators
Sample items:
1. Creatively solves challenging problems by drawing on diverse ideas or
knowledge.
2. Often finds solutions to problems by drawing on solutions or ideas developed in other industries, fields, or disciplines.
90th

80th

Percentile

70th

60th

50th

40th

30th
Start-up
entrepreneurs

Corporate
entrepreneurs

Product
innovators

Process
innovators

Noninnovators

expresso bars in Italy. Disruptive innovators shine best at associating when actively crossing all kinds of borders (geographic,
industry, company, profession, discipline, and so on) and engaging
the other innovator’s DNA skills.
Finding the right question, making compelling observations,
talking with diverse people, and experimenting with the world usually delivers productive, relevant associational insights. In contrast,
neglecting the other innovator’s DNA skills usually increases the

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randomness (and often irrelevance) of a new association or insight,
resulting in less impact on the marketplace. For an example similar to the identical twins scenario in chapter 1, consider two innovators independently attempting to surface valuable, new
associations. The first person engages actively and regularly in a full
range of discovery skills. The second does not. Which is most likely
to get relevant, high-impact ideas? Obviously, the first, since she’s
been fully immersed in the world of real people facing real challenges while searching for a better solution. No surprise that her associational “ahas” are far more productive than her counterpart’s
relatively “random” connections, likely made from the safety and
distance of an office chair.

On the Hunt for New Associations
In our work with disruptive innovators, we found several things
that best described the dynamics behind their search for new
associations. Creating odd combinations, zooming in and out,
and Lego thinking allowed them to connect the dots across diverse experiences and ultimately deliver disruptive new business
ideas.
Creating odd combinations

Neil Simon’s successful Broadway play and subsequent TV
series, The Odd Couple, centered on what life was like when
two very different people—a prissy newsman and a sloppy sportswriter—lived together as roommates. The friction between
opposite lifestyles often resulted in the most unexpected (and often
creative) outcomes. Similarly, innovators often try to put together
seemingly mismatched ideas to compose surprisingly successful
combinations. They create odd couples, triplets, or quadruplets
by consistently asking, “What if we combined this with that?” or

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“. . . this, this, and this with that?” They think different by fearlessly
uniting uncommon combinations of ideas.
For Lazaridis, connecting ideas across disciplines was something he learned relatively early in life:
When I was in high school, we had an advanced math
program and we had a shop program. And there was this
great divide between the two departments, and I was
in both. And I became, inadvertently, the ambassador
between the two disciplines, and saw how the mathematics we were learning in shop was actually more advanced
than some of the mathematics we were learning in
advanced math because we’re using trigonometry, we’re
using imaginary numbers, we’re using algebra, and even
calculus in very real, tangible ways. So I was then tasked
with bridging the gap and showing how math is used in
electronics and how electronics is used in math.
Lazaridis noted that a teacher alerted him to the link between
computers and wireless by telling him, “Don’t get too distracted
with computer technology because the person that puts wireless
and computers together is really coming up with something special.” And so the BlackBerry was born.
Likewise, Google cofounder Larry Page created an odd combination by connecting two seemingly unrelated ideas—academic
citations with Web search—to launch Google. As a PhD student
at Stanford, Page knew that academic journals and publishing
companies rank scholars by the cumulative number of citations
each scholar gets each year. Page realized that Google could rank
Web sites in the same way that academic citations rank scholars;
Web sites with the most links (that were most frequently selected)
had more citations. This association allowed Page and cofounder
Sergey Brin to launch a search engine yielding far superior search
results.

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Associating

Sometimes the world’s most innovative leaders capture what
seem like fleeting associations among ideas and knowledge, mixing
and matching quite different concepts. In so doing, they produce
the occasional outlandish ideas that may be catalysts for innovative
business ideas. EBay founder Pierre Omidyar gave us a recent example of how he came up with a wild idea. He had spoken with
consultants who were trying to solve the problem of how to get
produce quickly from the farm to consumers in Hawaii before it
spoils (the consultants explained that roughly one-third of the produce spoils). The first question Omidyar asked was, “What about
the post office? Doesn’t the post office go to everybody’s house six
times a week? Why don’t we just mail the head of lettuce?” He then
admitted: “It was probably an incredibly stupid idea and there are
probably a dozen reasons why it won’t work, but it’s an example of
how I put two things together that haven’t been put together before. I
understand the post office very well because eBay counts on shipping companies for the business model to work. The post office is
an organization that visits every household six times a week! Do
you know any other organization that does that? So using those assets in novel ways might be interesting.”
Not everyone would consider putting “fresh produce” and “post
office” together, but that’s the kind of thinking that increases the
probability of surfacing an innovative new business idea.
Zooming in and 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 (cofounder 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

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DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION STARTS WITH YOU

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.”
Steve Jobs has mastered zooming in and out to create excellent
and often industry-changing products. At one point, when designing the original Mac computer, his team struggled to get the
right finish on the plastic. Jobs unblocked the logjam by going to
a department store and zooming in on the details of different plastic appliances. He discovered a Cuisinart food processor that had
all the right plastic-case properties for producing an excellent case
for the first Mac. In other instances, he visited the company parking lot to examine details of different cars to gain new insights
about current or future product design challenges. One time, his
parking lot excursion revealed a Mercedes-Benz trim detail that
helped resolve a metal case-design dilemma.
Jobs is equally adept at zooming out to detect unexpected
intersections across diverse industries. For example, as a result of
buying and then leading Pixar for over a decade, he acquired a perspective on the entire media industry that was quite different from
one he had gained earlier in the computer industry. This produced
a powerful intersection of ideas when he returned to Apple. Years
of personal negotiation with Disney executives about distribution
rights and income for Pixar movies gave Jobs the insight and
experience that later helped him create a workable solution to
Internet-based music distribution—a solution that escaped senior
executives at other computer and MP3 player companies. Jobs’s
Pixar experience provided the broad cross-industry perspective that
has fueled the invention of several game-changing ideas like iTunes,
iPod, iPhone, and most recently, the iPad.

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Associating

Lego thinking

If innovators have one thing in common, it is that they love to
collect ideas, like kids love to collect Legos. Nobel Prize winner
Linus Pauling advised that “the best way to get a good idea is to
get a lot of ideas.” Thomas Edison kept over thirty-five hundred
notebooks of ideas during the course of his lifetime and set regular “idea quotas” to keep the tap open. Billionaire Richard Branson
is an equally passionate recorder of ideas, wherever he goes and
with whomever he talks. Yet, absolute quantity of ideas does not always translate into highly disruptive ideas. Why? Because “you cannot look in a new direction by looking harder in the same
direction,” says Edward de Bono, author of Lateral Thinking. In
other words, getting lots of ideas from lots of different sources creates the best of all innovation worlds. Innovators who frequently
engage in questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting
become far more capable at associating because they develop experience at understanding, storing, and recategorizing all this new
knowledge. This is important because the innovators we studied
rarely invented something entirely new; they simply recombined
the ideas they had collected in new ways, allowing them to offer
something new to the market. Questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting helped innovators slowly build larger,
richer stocks of building-block ideas in their heads. The more
building blocks they acquired, the better they were able to combine newly acquired knowledge to generate a novel idea.
To illustrate, think about a child playing with a set of Lego
blocks. The more different kinds of blocks the child uses to build
a structure, the more inventive she can become. But the most
innovative structures spring from the novel combination of a wid