When we think about innovation skills, one of the key skills we think about is an associating skill. And that's a skill that is not a commonly identified skill, but it's a skill that has been written about in a very key book called, The Innovator's DNA. And The Innovators DNA explores the five skills of disruptive innovators. And what we're going to do is look at each of these skills and see how they all come together. So the study itself, which was the basis for the book, sought to uncover the origin of innovative business ideas. And what they did, they did an eight year study that looked at hundreds of founders and CEOs of innovative companies. And among those people they try to focus on what their sources of individual creativity were. What their sources and approaches to innovation were. And what they found was a certain thing, what they termed as a discovery quotient. And it was a pattern of certain behaviors that emerge from the study, and that we're going to talk about here. And what they also found was something very interesting, was that all these skills, these innovator skills are relatively portable. They can occur not just in CEOs, not just in founders of companies, but they can occur in anybody. So let's ask what ways do innovators question? This is one of the basic skills. So they engage in question storming. They cultivate a question format of thinking. They're always thinking about how can we answer a question about something that's going on. They track their question and answer ratio and by that I mean they become very aware, whether they're asking a lot more questions than they are providing answers in any conversation. And they keep a question centered notebook, something that drives a sense of curiosity and questioning that they would have. And so to ask of disruptive question there, suggestion is composed a question about what is? What is going on In a certain situation? What caused it? Why did it happened? And why didn't it happen? And what if it were some other way it could happen? Another way to think about an innovator skill, is an observational skill. And innovators absorb in different ways and they absorb different things. They observe customers and users particularly because they give clues to how well the innovative idea or the innovative product, or the innovative service is working. They look at how companies work. They look at processes. They look at ways in which companies are innovative. And they use all five senses. We're going to talk about this in another discussion as well but, using all your senses, you really begin to pick up on things in ways that you might not normally be aware in some analytic mode. And so, you want to be able to recognize an anomaly and ask why it is that it happens. And what it does when it happens. And so a way to develop this skill is to set aside some time everyday and observe whatever strikes your fancy. Dig into tuning into what you're skills are and tune in to what's going on around you. Another skill that the book talks about is ways that innovators network with one another. And the goal is to expand the diversity of your network. And when you've expand that diversity, you can begin to make the connections that you would not have thought about. And so one example is to start some kind of a meal time networking plan. Have lunch with somebody different every day. Have breakfast, have coffee, have meetings with other people on a frequent basis. And plan to attend conferences that you might not have. Thought about in a relatively short time frame. You can do that over the next year, you can do that over the next couple of months. But exposing yourself to different types of people with different points of view and with different motivations about what they want to learn can really open up your horizons. You can start a creative community. A network of your own group of in-house people. Your own little study group that would be a group of people that are focused on something that they have the same observations, they have the same motivations as you do to learn about that subject area that you're mutually interested in. You can invite the views of an outsider. Occasionally cross paths with somebody who's not in your field but who can give you a point of view that you might not of expected. And finally, cross-training with experts, this is where you take some kind of a training, with people who are not necessarily in your discipline. But who are very good at what they do and you learn to understand what it is that they know. And not just what they know, but how they know what they know. And finally, experimenting. Ways that innovators experiment. Try on new experiences. Take apart products. Take apart a process. Take apart an idea. Find out how it works. Test ideas through pilots and prototypes and experiments. This is the notion of experimenting is actually a way in which you would understand something in a much deeper way then you would by simply reading about it. And by generating and testing new business ideas you can actually see how they work. So finally what this all leads to, is ways that innovators make associations. All of these things lead to making an association. And sometimes what innovators have to do is they have to force an associations. You can't quite see how something is connected to something else but you force an association, you speculate, you hypothesize what that association might be. And sometimes a way to do that is to take on the persona of a different role or a different company. Put yourself in the shoes of the director of another department or the director of another company and see how the idea that you have might work in that company. You can generate metaphors to explain what you observe. You can build your own curiosity box or your own tech box. Many of the great inventors have used things like tech boxes filled with artifacts of different things that they've been associated with that, they visit and connect with. So that when they reached a point where their block in their creativity. And one of the things that the author of this book talked about is an approached called SCAMPER. And this really an acronym for a series of terms and activities that you can use to break a part something and put it back together. So you can substitute something for a component. You can combine components. You can adapt something. You can modify it. You can put it to other uses. You can eliminate it, or you can rearrange it. All of these things are ways in which you can structure creativity. And so what that associational thinking does for innovators is, we can look at it in three parts here. We can [COUGH] start on the left hand side here by looking at the importance of having the courage to be innovative. And in many ways, you have to sometimes challenge the status quo that you have. And take some risks and try some things out. And the behaviors that you can engage in, we've talked about them, the questioning behavior, the observing behavior, the networking behavior, the experimenting behavior. All of them contribute to associational thinking and where things come together, you make sense of how things relate to one another. And associating is really defined as a cross pollination of ideas. Where you connect different ideas with people, technologies, disciplines and all kinds of other forms of connection that tend to produce a different way of looking at the business idea. And so here are we look at a format, a graphic that really begins to look at all the elements of innovation and the association, the questioning, the networking, the observing, and the experimenting and how do they play out for people who are in different roles. Ont the left-hand side you can see the five different roles that people might have. There are startup entrepreneurs, there are corporate entrepreneurs or let's say, they are product innovators or program innovators or process innovators. Or let's say, they are not innovators at all. And we begin to see the way in which each of these five dimensions that we've talked about plays out. And as we can see in the startup entrepreneur there is a very high rate of associational skill, it's necessary. Questioning skill is also very necessary and as you see as you work your way down to the people who basically would be employers or people who are not necessarily in an innovative role, you find that these associational skills are not as important as they would be for others. And so you have to recognize the pace and the position in which you're in in your venture, and to say when do I need these associational skills? And so some takeaways from this idea of association. As a skill, as a competency for entrepreneurs and for innovators. Is that discoveries skills play a greater rule in early stage companies. Whereas delivery skills, thinks that get implemented play a greater rule in later stage companies. And associational thinkers actually serve to cross-pollinate ideas. And they make essential connections, and creative connections within their firms.
