Two weekends ago, I went to Disneyland with my brother. We had a good time and got a on a lot rides. Including some I’ve never gotten on before. Astro Blasters is one such ride. If you’ve never experienced it, think of it as a shooting gallery on wheels.

Basically, you ride a two person pod that has two laser guns attached to it along with a screen that shows you how many points you have. Your task is to hit targets with the letter “Z” on them. Different targets are worth different points. And, as you’ve probably guessed, you have to accumulate as many points as you can.

What is interesting about this ride, beyond the shooting, is that the Disney staff loading you onto the pods don’t tell you about specific goals (points) you should reach for. Nor did I see any Leader boards anywhere. I did see people taking pictures of the screen where their total points is displayed. Most likely they were going to share this with their friends and brag about it.

It is a fun and exhilarating ride. Very different that just sitting there and looking at your surroundings. But…ask me what I remember about what I saw inside. Not much.

I do remember where I saw those “Z” targets I had to shoot at. I don’t remember much of what was around that. Interesting right?

Context matters

Here’s the issue at hand and how it relates to our ability to innovate: we must be able to focus intently on our goal/objective, but we must also take a step back and gain perspective. I’ve talked about this before, to focus really hard on noticing things (for example people smiling), all you have to do is program yourself to do exactly that and ignore everything else. This isn’t difficult at all. It is what most modern organizations want and get their employees to do.

But, taking the smiling example further, by only focusing on smiles you’ll lose context and won’t be able to understand why people are smiling.

For us humans, this is a challenge. We have a tendency, it gets stronger when in group-think, to fall into tunnel vision. This is why framing a challenge or goal in a way that makes you think about it differently is so important. Too narrow and people may lose perspective. Too wide and people won’t have direction.

When pursuing goals, for example, we may fall into bad behaviors in the pursuit of those goals. This is a big “no-no” if you want to set out and change the game. And, as I said above, context matters, even for goals. Personally, I find it very difficult, when talking with a prospect about their issues, to just focus on one issue that they are dealing with. Because problems/issues don’t live in isolation, and are rarely the result of one single driver, I tend to look beyond the obvious.

Bottom line: If you’re told what to look for, you can’t see anything else…Creativity isn’t a switch the majority can flip at will, so the key to being innovative is to view a problem from a different perspective. To do this, you have constantly zoom-out and back in. Remember, there’s more than meets the eye.

Related posts:

1. Powerful Strategic Thinking technique for non-strategic thinkers
2. The importance of having real-time vision
3. The Table of Strategic Elements: Visualize and Create New Strategies

How do you do real business development? “Stop guessing. Business is done outside the office!” That is the core message from Stu Heilsberg’s book. A true Business Development Executive, Stu shares his experience in The Answers Are Outside The Building.

Business development is customer/client development. Being Startup Weekend Organizer and entrepreneur, I’m well aware of the “customer development” concept advocated by Eric Ries and Steve Blank.

You may get this, and may even do it. And, I know what you are thinking, get out and talk to customers. Right? Wrong. That is only part of it. What Stu teaches you, is that you should go out and talk not just to customers, but also partners. and even competitors. It is Business Ecosystem Development.

And, the motivation to look at it this way is: I don’t know. As in, the answers are not inside our building. They are out there and we have to go get them.

Thought Stu does have a process to do this, this is a book about mindset. Not about process. The process is very straightforward, but you must move out of your own way of sitting in a conference room trying to guess what it is that is happening out there.

The mindset is that you shouldn’t sell, you should aim to help. And, that starts by listening. This is why this book resonated with me on so many levels. I highly recommend it, it is a quick read but it packs a punch with insights.

Go ahead and connect with Stu on Twitter and LinkedIn. Also, visit his website to learn to engage ecosystems effectively and quickly.

Related posts:

1. If you can’t answer these questions, your business is irrelevant
2. Delivering happiness: Not business as usual
3. How to create a new business model

Here are HBR’s 10 must read articles on innovation. No need to buy, although you can if you want to, as I’ve compiled the PDF’s for each article right here. Just click on the link and voila!

1. Innovation’s Holy Grail by C.K. Prahalad and R.A. Mashelkar

2. Stop the Innovation Wars by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble

3. How GE Is Disrupting Itself by Jeffrey R. Immelt, Vijay Govindarajan, and Chris Trimble

4. The Customer-Centered Innovation Map by Lance A. Bettencourt and Anthony W. Ulwick

5. The Innovation Value Chain by Morten T. Hansen and Julian Birkinshaw

6. Is It Real? Can We Win? Is It Worth Doing? by George S. Day

7. Innovation: The Classic Traps by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

8. Discovery-Driven Planning by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. MacMillan

9. The Discipline of Innovation by Peter F. Drucker

10. Innovation Killers: How Financial Tools Destroy Your Capacity to Do New Things by Clayton M. Christensen, Stephen P. Kaufman, and Willy C. Shih.

Related posts:

1. Innovation must reads of the week: Five Ways to Ruin Your Innovation Process
2. Innovation must reads of the week: Nine Rules for Stifling Innovation
3. Innovation must reads of the week: Innovation does not emerge out of nothing

Get a chance to win a signed copy of The Innovator’s DNA.  Sign up for our free newsletter to enter.  If you’re the lucky winner, you will have access to a very well written book about creativity, innovation and leadership that is free of buzzwords at your fingertips.

Entry deadline is May 20.

As a newsletter subscriber, you’ll get email updates of my innovation focused blogs posts, as well as resources and tips. You won’t get any spam from me. I promise you.

CLICK HERE TO ENTER!

On May 21, 2013, I’ll announce the lucky winner.

You must be a newsletter subscriber to win.

Oh! Two more things. First, earlier today, I posted an interview I did with the authors of the book. Let me know what you think. Second, please take the time to answer this short poll. I’ll share the results with you

Related posts:

1. The Best of Game-Changer October 2012
2. The Best of Game-Changer November 2012
3. Effort as a game-changer

A few weeks ago, I got the chance to interview the authors of the bestselling innovation book, The Innovator’s DNA.  Below is the transcript of what I was able to record from our call.

Before, here is short bio of each author:

Hal Gregersen is the Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank Chair of Innovation and Leadership at INSEAD and Jeff Dyer is the Horace Beesley Professor of Strategy at BYU’s Marriott School of Management. They are co-authors of The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators and most recently worked together on Innovator’s Accelerator, an online executive education experience designed to develop individuals’ and organizations’ innovation skills.

What was the motivation behind writing this book and what surprised you most about what you found?

Hal: I’ve had a lifelong commitment to understanding effective leadership. The capacity to innovate and create unique solutions has always been at the forefront of successful leadership. About ten years ago, Jeff and I asked Clayton Christensen: How do disruptive thinkers actually get the original ideas behind their businesses ideas, the ones that completely change the face of the world? None of us had a clear answer. Asking these questions created a fascinating chance to interview some of the most successful disruptive innovators on earth. We wanted to see how they got new ideas and how they made those ideas happen. So, for me it was an intriguing journey to understand what these folks do on a day to day basis to develop ideas that make a difference. One of the somewhat surprising insights from the research was that disruptive innovators definitely show consistent behavioral patterns. They act differently to think differently. We subsequently discovered in our global database of over 6,000 entrepreneurs and executives that anyone who chooses to act and think like famous innovators do can also generate ideas that make a difference.

Jeff: For me the primary driver of this project was a conversation that Hal Gregersen and I had with Clayton Christensen. We asked him: Where do these disruptive business ideas come from in the first place? He said: You know, I don’t really know.

And, then we thought, that would be interesting to study. The origins of these disruptive innovations.

And second, around that same time, I saw some research that had been done by psychologists looking at whether creativity was more genetically based or something that was learned. And saw that in fact it was something that was more learned than genetically based. So, there was something that we could actually study. If it’s not genetics, then what is it?  What is it that creative thinkers learn along the way? And what techniques do they use to help them get innovative ideas?

So, the combination of the conversations with Clay and knowing that it wasn’t just genetics was a prime catalyst for me to want to do this project.

As far as what surprised me most from the overall study, it was that creativity is really something you can learn. If you act different, then you can think different. I had bought into the right-left brain notion of genetic endowment that some have it and some don’t. And, I’m never going to be like Steve Jobs. I’m not going to try. But in the last couple of years I’ve been involved in creating some new products and starting a couple of new businesses. I never saw myself as an entrepreneur or as someone who gets to create new things but now, using the techniques that we uncovered in the study, I’ve realized that I can come up with some new things too.

Hal: What surprised me was that many of these leaders were not very articulate at explaining how they went about discovering new ideas. They were highly creative and built businesses that changed entire industries, but the businesses couldn’t sustain themselves over time. Part of this inability to build and sustain an innovative culture resulted from not knowing how they, as senior leaders, innovated at a personal level, and as a result, they failed at teaching others in their organizations how to do it equally well. In contrast, other innovative leaders who exhibited high self-awareness about how they personally generated new ideas were exactly the ones who excelled at teaching others how to discover and deliver new, disruptive ideas. Ultimately, innovation is not an individual sport.  It is a team sport and takes many people working together to generate great new ideas and then make them happen.

Jeff: As an example of that, Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, became very aware that it was his observations that lead to the ideas for QuickBooks and Quicken and he was really good at creating a set of training materials to share his experiences with the folks at Intuit. So he taught people how to become great observers and he built that as part of the company culture.

Hal: Disruptive innovators ask provocative questions, ones that challenge the status-quo. They have high question-to-answer ratios, asking far more questions than giving answers to others. The best innovators we encountered asked fundamental questions, as they tried to figure out what’s really going on. They often start with What is?- and Why?-centric questions in their search for understanding what was currently going on with customers. Once they understood well why people were doing what they did, innovators then moved to asking a series of What if?, Why not?, and How might? questions to uncover entirely new ways of approaching a situation. They endlessly pepper the world with inquiries to figure out what is before tackling the even bigger challenge of figuring out what might be.

Of the five skills, is there one skill in particular that is more important than all others? Why?

Jeff: Associational thinking is the most important of the five skills. If you practice the other skills, but don’t do associational thinking, you won’t get the impact you want.

The reason associational thinking is the most important is because the other behaviors bring in new knowledge that trigger the associations that actually produce the novel idea. So, it’s a cognitive skill. The other four are behavioral skills that have a cognitive dimension to them to some extent; you can just start asking questions and start doing observations and it starts a behavior. But, the ultimate goal is to put two things together that haven’t been put together in a new way to produce something that’s novel and hopefully useful and implementable, which is what we think about as innovation – a novel idea that’s useful and also doable.

So, what advice do you have for established companies that want to become more creative?

Jeff: What we’ve learned about the most innovative companies in the world is that they are comprised of people who score high on the five discovery skills, that they have some processes in place as they problem solve that encourage them to question, observe, network and to experiment. And, they have philosophies or cultures that encourage folks to innovate in the sense that they expect innovation.

For example, being a part of Apple or Google you are expected to innovate.

For people who think they are not creative, what would you advise them to do?

Hal: That is a great question. I think everybody has an opportunity or a challenge for which they don’t have a solution and they’re trying to figure out a good solution to it. So, the first stage of getting a new idea is caring about something enough to do something about it. So, find a problem or an opportunity that matters, one that matters in your head and your heart. The next step is learning how to generate better questions related to that problem, questions that might open up additional avenues to understanding it.  Imagine questions as catalysts that transform our understanding of a situation; they are the key that unlocks an entirely new problem solving direction. Years ago I stumbled across an innovative question generating technique that we now call Question Storming. Put simply, generate as many questions as you can about a problem or opportunity and then figure out which questions are most worth finding answers to. A simple way to start this process is to take the problem that you care about and set aside four minutes a day for the next 24 days to write nothing but questions about it. I would be very surprised if asking nothing but questions for about an hour and a half over the next 24 days would not start changing your understanding of a problem, as well as potential solutions. As new questions surface, use your observing, networking and experimenting skills to figure out surprising new solutions to a problem.

What are the obstacles to teaching innovation?

Jeff: Organizations are designed for execution and process – routine and repetition. There are three main obstacles to innovation in organizations. First, people say: Innovation is not my job….it’s R&D’s job.  Innovation is not expected of me. Second, folks say: I don’t get time for it and therefore it is not a priority. So they just don’t try. Third, many organizations simply don’t encourage and support risk taking behavior—and failure—which is part of the innovation process. So folks aren’t willing to try because there are too many risks and not enough rewards.

What is the easiest way to motivate someone to innovate?

Hal: The folks from the Apollo Group approached Clay, Jeff and me and provided this once in a lifetime opportunity to create an online learning experience where not just 10, 20 or 100 people but literally tens of thousands of people can rapidly increase their creativity skills. So, Apollo brought IDEO on to the team and we collaboratively figured out how to motivate people to become more creative. Basically, the Innovator’s Accelerator is a six-week learning experience with groups of 30 people within a company. Individuals are exposed to phenomenal high-end video learning material around key concepts from The Innovator’s Dilemma, The Innovator’s Solution, and The Innovator’s DNA. They also have access to fascinating case study video examples and to a highly engaging skill assessment at the beginning of the learning experience (because feedback is critical to becoming competent at anything). The Innovators DNA Assessment helps individuals understand their strengths as an innovator and the dynamic online report also shows them how to also strengthen their skills. Participants also actively participate in the social media space and use the innovation skills that they are learning with each other. Working in teams of five to six people, participants actively solve problems that matter and deliver greater value to their companies.

Historically Jeff, Clay or I have gone in and given a speech to senior level leaders, and perhaps done several workshops with other leaders at the mid- to senior-levels. But there comes a point in which our personal work (delivering live speeches and workshops) can only get us so far and the train-the-trainer model is still overly reliant on lots of other individuals still doing the labor intensive training. So, what’s happened with the Innovator Accelerator is that it has moved the process of delivering live workshops to relatively few senior leaders to enabling an entire company, in a very short period of time, to become much better innovators. It’s truly disruptive.

What are you most proud about this book?

Hal: We’re deeply proud of having been given the honor of interviewing and working with some of the most incredible innovators around the world, understanding how they do their work and being able to share that in a book that is easily accessible by anyone in the world (it’s now translated into thirteen languages). When anyone comes to realize that he or she can become a better innovator, that is a great day because at the end of the day we all have far more creative capacity than we think.

Jeff: I teach a creative strategic thinking class at BYU and see students seeking to become more creative. What I’m most proud of is that the book creates confidence in people’s ability to do things they didn’t think they were able to do.

Related articles

• Five Tips: Spotting a Potential Innovator (blogs.wsj.com)
• Interview with Dr. Hal Gregersen, Co-Author of The Innovator’s DNA (zanesafrit.typepad.com)
• Interview with Dr. Hal Gregersen, Co-Author of The Innovator’s DNA – Pt. 1 (zanesafrit.typepad.com)
• Is Innovation Part of Your Organization’s DNA? (innovationmanagement.se)

Related posts:

1. To foster innovation, what type of network do I need to create?
2. 7 Useful questions for innovators
3. How the Innovators DNA works

There is no right answer.

But, to start, we have to be conscious about it. Then, we have to make an effort to look at what isn’t there and formulate what could be. To do this, we can start by asking better questions. This is the same dilemma Clay Christensen was in when he was studying disruption. Because he knew that a primary task of leadership is asking questions that anticipate great challenges, to be able to help business leaders better deal with uncertainty and its many challenges, he had to start asking better questions himself.

So, here’s how he figured out how to start asking better questions (last paragraph):

Yes. I realized this back when I was an MBA student. I had an epiphany during a marketing course. We were studying a peanut butter company and I wrote down all the answers that the other students gave. Then I suddenly realized: Why was I writing all this down? I was never going to go work for a peanut butter company, and if I did, I wasn’t going to run into the problems that this management had faced 10 years before. But I paid all this tuition; I had to write something. So what notes would I take?

The next student to speak was a woman who made a brilliant comment. Instead of writing down what she said, I wrote down a question—the question I thought she had to have had in mind to think of this response. A bit later, a guy in the back row made a similarly insightful comment. I wrote down the question that he had clearly asked himself. The next morning, when I prepared a case for the day’s class, I put those two questions on the table next to me. I asked those questions of the case, and, holy cow, I saw things I would never have caught before. I came across as very smart that day.

Thereafter, I kept listening not to what smart people said as answers, but to the questions they were asking. Over time, I realized that although some questions seemed salient only once or twice, others were always important. That’s how I came up with the way I develop theories: Instead of looking at the data about today’s performance, I keep my attention on the questions I need to ask so I can catch the issues of the future.

So, anytime you hear or read an insightful comment, think about the question that lead to that comment. In other words, try to understand their thought process. I cannot stress this enough, it is much more effective to think about the thought process than to simply take everything as a given.

It is a point I take so seriously, that I always ask people how they came up with their ideas. As well as how they executed on them. After the fact, the “what” is irrelevant. It is already done. What is more important, is the “how”. It is the process in between, where all the thinking and rethinking was done, that matters the most.

In the end, you’ll become a better thinker.

Bottom line: Future-proofing yourself begins pondering the impossible. Questions are only the beginning. The next step, is to turn those questions into hypotheses that we can then test in a cheap and speedy way.

Related posts:

1. You are only as great as the questions you ask
2. Weekend innovation tip: what made you great in the past will not make you great in the future
3. What are the big unanswered, but answerable, questions when it comes to innovation?

Pepe Paez is a technologist with a deep enthusiasm for marketing strategy. With more than 10 years in the software development industry, he keeps a strong understanding of technology that goes where he goes and is part of his signature in new projects. Most recently, his interest and expertise revolves around Pricing Strategy and overall Strategic Marketing, where he tries to disrupt thinking by going back to basics.

He likes to spend his time between finding new things, being silly with his family and trying to actually enjoy a yoga class. You can find Pepe on Twitter, LinkedIn or email him directly pepe@obsidian.mx

Innovation, as a topic or theme, has been around long enough to become the hype, go into the grave, come back from the dead, and continue a cycle after another to make it a time-tested concept.

And, while innovation in pricing is somewhat common today, it certainly wasn’t in the past. Examples abound, but one category in particular perfectly exemplifies why innovation and disruption in pricing are important.

Dog food has been around long enough that anyone can familiarize with buying some of it for a pet or seen a friend do the same. And, it is quite easy to get lost in all the different types of food, brands, benefits of one type of food to another, and the prices, or the prices they charge. They can be something hurting for some, but if you pay attention, there is always someone who buys the most expensive food, the most exclusive toys and whatnot for their dog.

It wasn’t always like this. Dog food was much simpler 30 years ago. Back then, dog food was simply offered based on the age and size of the dog (small puppy to big adult). This segmentation was enough to cover any need for any dog owner, their dog was either a puppy or an adult, and it was either small, medium or big. Dog food manufacturers didn’t have a problem with that, their labs had, through the use of science, cracked the nut in terms of nutrition requirements of man’s best friend.

The market segmentation would look something like this:

But like in any other industry, innovation reared its head and eventually someone thought, “what if there is something more in terms of value for the dog owners besides nutrition?” And, it wasn’t something hard to figure out. As I said, today there is always someone buying the most expensive food. Back then, it was people who would take their dogs to the vet, then to a spa, to the fine restaurant and then to a cruise.

These were people who saw their pets as something else, companion maybe, surrogate child? What really mattered was an understanding of the characteristics, and look beyond the realm of traditional market segmentation and taste the honey of value based segmentation.

While I would love to dedicate a big portion of this post to that topic, I’ll refrain and focus on the effects of value based segmentation to this example and how that reflects to the power of disruption, especially in pricing.

In this case, what some dog manufacturers started to see was how people would see their pet as part of multiple categories: a pet, an employee, a mascot or companion, a child or even as a grandchild.

This led to a much different segmentation for the industry and how their offerings could be delivered to the different segments.

Such segmentation started to look more like this:

Even though this segmentation is far from complete, it does start to show what market studies found: that certain segments were willing to spend more and pay more than the average household. For example, owners with little children spend less than average, while older householders with children no longer living in the house spend 30 percent more than average. And, this has nothing to do with nutritional requirements, the size or age of the dog.

Now, from a pricing perspective (and recalling the high value concept of value based pricing) it was clearly that similar offerings (with very small degress of variation in some cases) could be marketed for widely ranged price points, for someone who sees their dog as an employee they’ll look for nutrition and nothing else, but someone who sees their dog as a child or a grandchild they look for something else: the best for their child–err dog. And, this lead food manufacturers to broaden their offering and basically alter the way we buy dog food today.

Why is disruption important?

This example is very easy and clear to drive the message. In this case, the disruption in price was driven by a paradigm shift in market segmentation, and more specifically, on how the market is perceived. That is, the variables that are used to measure its composition.

What industry or product would you change today? Is there anything that drives you to think there is opportunity being left on the table if the variables that govern a certain industry were just a bit, well, disrupted?

Related posts:

1. How to manage through disruption
2. What a small hardware store owner can teach you about creating value
3. Innovation Posts of the week: Move with the speed of disruption