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    You are here Home » innovation

    Learning from the Innovation Leaders

    Last updated on Apr 23, 2015 by Dan McCarthy · This post may contain affiliate links

    Guest post from Rowan Gibson:

    Not since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution has there
    been a greater need to learn the art of innovation leadership. In today’s hyper-accelerating,
    value-based economy the churn of “creative destruction” has become more intense
    than even Joseph Schumpeter could have imagined. Successful products, services,
    strategies, and business models now have a shorter shelf-life than ever before
    in business history, which means that “innovate or die” is not just a cute bumper
    sticker; it’s a brutal reality of twenty-first century competition.

    As innovation moves from interesting to urgent on the
    corporate agenda, many leaders are recognizing that they feel much more
    comfortable with improving execution than with the creative challenge of industry
    revolution. Generating new ideas, recognizing those with breakthrough
    potential, and then mobilizing an organization to drive those ideas from the
    mind to the market – often in the face of substantial risk and uncertainty – is
    not something every CEO feels cut out to do. But as execution capabilities become
    commodities, and the life cycles of new offerings get increasingly shorter,
    it’s precisely these innovation skills that need to be learned. And who better
    to learn them from than the innovation leaders themselves?

    Who do we think of as innovation leaders? In the late
    nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was the industry-builders like
    Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney. In our own day, it’s industry
    disruptors like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, or Richard Branson. But what exactly
    can today’s business leaders learn from these iconic innovators? What if
    individuals like these are simply wired differently from the rest of us, making
    them capable of innovating in ways that mere mortals, or ordinary
    companies—cannot possibly hope to match? This is certainly what folklore, and
    often the innovators themselves, would have us believe. But it turns out not to
    be the case. In fact, any leader – and any organization – can learn to emulate
    the thinking patterns of the world’s greatest innovators.

    If one looks deeply at hundreds of examples of business
    innovation, an interesting pattern begins to emerge. Specifically, what we find
    is that, time and again, innovation came not from some inherent, individual brilliance
    but from looking at the world from a completely fresh perspective. It came from
    an alternative way of seeing things – a different set of “lenses” – that
    enabled the innovators to look through the familiar and spot the unseen. In
    fact, four essential perspectives or “perceptual lenses” seem to dominate most innovation
    stories, and often also characterize the entrepreneurs behind them:

    1. Challenging Orthodoxies: Questioning
    and overturning common
    assumptions
    inside companies and across whole industries about what
    drives success. Innovation leaders never accept that there is only one “right” way of doing things. They
    take a contrarian stance. They are willing to challenge even the most deeply
    entrenched beliefs, and to explore new and perhaps highly unconventional
    answers.

    Recall how Nicolas Hayek trashed
    traditions in the Swiss Watch industry by introducing Swatch. Or how Ingvar
    Kamprad turned furniture retail on its head with IKEA’s radical self-pick-up
    and self-assembly model. Or how Herb Kelleher upended air travel with Southwest’s
    low-cost, no-frills, fun-in-the-air approach. Consider James Dyson’s bagless
    vacuum cleaner, or Michael Dell’s rejection of computer dealer channels in
    favor of manufacturing and selling individually configured PCs directly to
    customers.

    2. Harnessing Trends: Spotting
    patterns of change that could substantially change the rules of the game. Innovation leaders pay close attention
    to nascent trends and discontinuities that have the potential to profoundly impact
    the future of an industry – changes that others often ignore until it’s too
    late. Innovators make sure they are riding these waves of change rather than
    being washed away by them.

    Jeff Bezos recognized the
    revolutionary portent of e-commerce back in 1994 when he read a trend report
    about the explosive growth of internet usage. He asked himself what kind of
    business model would make sense in the context of such exponential growth, and
    his answer was Amazon’s original online bookstore. Soon afterward, he expanded
    this business to become the “Wal-Mart of the Web” while Wal-Mart itself
    hesitated to grab this opportunity. Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix understood
    what Internet-based video streaming would eventually do to DVD-based rentals.
    At the right time he shifted his business model to ride the oncoming wave of
    on-demand media while Blockbuster video got hit by the tsunami.

    3. Leveraging Resources: Thinking
    of a company as a portfolio of skills and assets rather than as a provider of
    products or services for specific markets. Innovation leaders look for ways to repurpose, redeploy, and recombine
    various resources to create exciting new growth opportunities.

    Consider
    how Walt Disney – or the folks from ESPN – leveraged core competencies and
    strategic assets to build global entertainment empires. Or how Richard Branson
    turned a single record store in London, UK, into a conglomerate comprising over
    400 companies in a range of different industries. Or how Larry Page and Sergey
    Brin stretched beyond search, expanding into productivity software, operating
    systems, hardware, self-driving cars, advanced robotics, and even
    life-extension technologies.

    4. Understanding Needs: Learning to live inside the customer’s skin,
    empathizing with unarticulated feelings and identifying unmet needs. Innovation
    leaders put themselves in the customer’s shoes and are able to feel their “pain
    points.” Then they design solutions from the customer backward.

    Gary and Diane Heavin
    noticed that gyms were not catering to the needs of women. Their answer was Curves—a
    women-only club which is now the world’s largest fitness franchise chain. Fred
    Smith saw the need for a global, overnight courier service and turned his idea
    into Fedex. Nobody asked Steve Jobs for an iPod, an IPhone, or an iPad but
    somehow he knew that we would want – and need – these things.

    So what can we learn from the innovation leaders? A great
    deal. In my new book “The Four Lenses of
    Innovation: A Power Tool For Creative Thinking,”
    I explain exactly how we
    can use the above four perspectives to emulate the mind of the innovator and to
    unlock the brainpower of our organizations.

    Rowan Gibson is recognized as one
    of the world’s foremost thought leaders on innovation. His new book, The Four lenses of Innovation (Wiley), examines the thinking
    patterns or perspectives that have been catalysts for breakthrough innovation
    throughout human history, and shows you how to use these perspectives to infuse
    creativity into your organization.
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