Introduction
For the past couple of weeks, I have been reading The Innovator’s DNA. I was a little hesitant at first because the title alone says that it will be talking about being innovative. I didn’t really think I had an innovative bone in my body. The introduction and chapter one of the book tells us though that innovation can be practiced. The one thing that caught my attention is that the authors have been experimenting for years about finding out about what makes people innovative. The book gives us five “discovery skills” that make people more innovative. The discovery skills in the book are association, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting. This paper will be my personal action plan on how I am going to practice
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Throughout the time I was reading this book, I learned that in order to practice with my discovery skills, I must diversify myself. So when I was thinking of a way that I could diversify myself while actively observing, I thought of a few plans that I could follow through with.
The first thing I am going to do in order to be an active observer is to try to observe something that I do not know anything about. As mentioned in the quote above, when you observe different things properly, you start to connect things. I have decided that I am going to start to try to become competent in something that is not business related. I have an Associates’ degree in business management and a Bachelor’s degree in business management. I also am going for my Master’s in business administration. I think it is safe to say that I am learning a lot about business. To become competent in something other than business, I plan to start off by buying a book unrelated to business and read that book in my spare time. I was thinking that I would buy a book that has to do with computers. I understand the basics of a computer because I have taken a college level computer class. I want to become competent in programming so that maybe I could make connections between business and technology. The authors of The Innovator’s DNA use the founder of Salesforce.com as a great example of somebody who mixed his knowledge of technology and
Need, curiosity and innovation are essential to invention. Try for the highest level of integration in all disciplines.
I've always been a calm and collective individual, favoring the slow and calculated approach to problem solving, assuring the problem is achieved to maximum success. As such, I'm the kind of person to try everything first hand, in order to find out the true best way in order to accomplish a task, despite what a guide may say. However, I also have the intelligence to do so in a productive way. They say you shouldn't reinvent the wheel, and to build upon others success, at some point someone tried just that, and was able to create a 'better' wheel. At the end of the day, it is still a wheel, but it's this innovation that drives the world forward. I'm an innovator. I'll be the guy trying the thing no one thought of, using some method someone dismissed as 'xp waste' and still be able to put some spin on it in order to create something that is better than everything else.
After completing the Discovery Wheel and the Learning Style Inventory assignments which are presented by the text book Becoming a Master Student (Ellis, 2006, pp. 78-82), I discovered that I should trust my instinct now more than ever. I’ve always felt most confident when I had a chance to implement my knowledge and understanding in a lab or a real life setting. I learned that facts, figures, and examples are important parts in the way I learn. Breaking something down into smaller units and examining these units individually is something I enjoy doing, but that is not my preferred learning style.
4.3 Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Innovator) – Engage in innovative activities by using creative thinking to envision better ways of accomplishing professional goals.
In The DNA of Innovators, The discovery skills are the new ideas introduced by the innovator who did the five skills of: associating, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting. Intuitive Surgical did use some of these skills very well. The first one I noticed them using was the networking skill. According to Dyer, Gregerson & Christensen, the idea networker, “networks to actively tap into new ideas and insights by
The additional book that I read was The Innovator’s DNA by Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregerson, and Clayton M. Christensen. It is a guide for individuals to creatively think for disruptive ideas. The books covers methods but also how founders applied them to their lives to materialize their ideas. The tips given can easily be applied to the successfulness to our startups but some can also apply to our own personal lives.
(Continued from front flap) is the Horace 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. 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.
Jill Lepore criticizes Clayton M. Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma” (originally published in 1997) via The New Yorker among other sources in “The Disruption Machine: What the gospel of innovation gets wrong.”
The word ‘innovation’ is derived from Latin word ‘innovare’, which means “to change something to new”. In other words, we may say that ‘innovation’ means changing the regular way of doing things and involves doing the regular things in a novel way.
Secondly, the first cognitive skill stated in Innovator’s DNA is questioning which I also consider myself to me good at. I believe that it is the questioning part of innovation that actually leads to solutions. As an example, in an industry where I do not know anything about, it’s only through questioning that I will be able to understand the ins and outs. Similarly, this was illustrated in the IDEO video.
As Malcom Godwell, author of OUTLIERS, has shown that the success is as much as a result of opportunities. So I think if we combine the idea of Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One where he wants us to think out of the box not to follow the traditional misinterpreted patterns of historian to stimulate your creativity and combining it with Foster idea of using courage and overcoming fears. F. P johns says criticism is hard to take by your friends and relatives .The fear of rejection holds us back Foster advises us to remember that everyone is afraid don’t be scared infect scare use their fear to overcome them. Only first few ideas are hard to get once you start getting an idea you will be sitting in hail of ideas. He believes it’s not true that people are born with creative mind he says it’s something they learn to generate and can be learned by anyone with practice so don’t be embrace having an idea is better than not having an idea at all. This book makes you feel very optimistic he has cleverly put together exercise.es, stories , quotations , illustrations offering a practical and fun way of generating
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 for a successful
In The Innovator’s DNA textbook, Dyer, Gregersen, and Christensen highlight the five aforementioned discovery skills for successful innovation: associating, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting. They also highlight four delivery or execution skills which include analyzing, planning, detail-oriented implementing, and self-disciplined executing. Dyer, Gregersen, and Christensen researched and tested the assertion that innovative executives have a different set of skills than typical executives; the researchers used the innovator’s DNA assessment to measure the percentile rank of a sample of high
Globalization is becoming a fast trend that will require leaders to have the five discovery skills and be capable of thinking outside of the box to acquire new ideas and ways to advance technology to help organizations gain the advantage to be successful in the today’s society. Leaders cannot be afraid to take that leap to make innovation work and leaders have to look for the right group of people to help implement their ideas and changes needed to be competitive.
one-third from genetics; but two-thirds of the innovation skill set comes through learning – first