The document outlines an 8-year study on the origins of disruptive business ideas, emphasizing the importance of individual creativity and discovery skills in driving innovation. It discusses the roles of questioning, observing, networking, experimenting, and associating in fostering innovative thinking, along with practical tips for enhancing these skills. The findings underscore that innovation is not only about generating ideas but also about implementing them effectively and recovering from failures.

1. Worldview of
the “front-end”
of innovation:
people, ideas
and systems
driving
innovation

3. About the Study
Primary purpose was to uncover the origins of innovative – and often
disruptive – business ideas.
8-year collaborative study of disruptive innovators
Hundreds of Inventors, Founders and CEOs of innovative companies
Innovative companies defined as those having an “innovation premium”
where a company’s market value cannot be accounted from cash flows of its
current products or businesses in its current markets.
Study focused on individual creativity as opposed to company strategy
Pattern of behaviors emerged/Discovery Quotient

4. What is this study important?
Innovator skills are portable. They matter as much for
management, intrapreneurship and entrepreneurship : 90 – 8 – 2
“rule”
It will stimulate your creativity and inquisitiveness
It will assist you to generate better ideas
It will give you a competitive advantage

5. What’s Your Innovator Profile?

6. The ability to generate
innovative ideas is not
merely a function of the
mind, but also a function of
the exercise of
behavioral skills.

7. Discovery Skills Delivery Skills
Questioning** Analyzing
Observing** Planning
Networking** Detail-oriented
implementing
Experimenting** Disciplined executing
Associating
** behaviors that generate the data and insights that fuel associative thinking

8. Business Discovery Delivery
Stage Skills Skills
Startup
Growth
Maturity
Decline

10. "You don't invent the answers, you reveal the
answers by finding the right questions.“
- Jonas Salk
“The important and difficult job is never to find the right answers, it is to
find the right questions. For there are few things as useless – if not
dangerous – as the right answer to the wrong question.”
- Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management

11. Questioning
Innovators ask 1) more questions and 2) more provocative questions
than non-innovators
Questions that describe the territory explore what currently is/what
caused.
Questions that disrupt the territory use “why?”, “why not?” and
most importantly “what if?”
“What if?” questions are especially important. By
Imposing/Removing constraints forces out-of-the-box thinking
because it ignites new associations.
Questions alone do not produce innovations

12. Questioning
Combine questioning with other discovery skill behaviours (observing,
networking and experimenting).
Tips:
• Engage in QuestionStorming
• Cultivate question thinking
• Track your Q/A ratio
• Keep a question-centered notebook

14. "The real voyage of
discovery consists not in
seeking new landscapes
but in having new eyes."
- Marcel Proust

15. Familiarity, habits and routine dull our observation skills

17. Observing
Vuja de – a sense of seeing something for the first time even though
you have seen it many times before.
IDEO – “Pretend to be an anthropologist”
Pay attention to “workarounds” as a source of innovation
opportunity/Look for surprises
Understand all dimensions of “getting the job done” – functional, social
and emotional
Change your environment/Be open and patient/Engage your senses

19. Networking
Innovators go out of their way to meet people with different perspectives.
Innovators are idea networkers whereas non-innovators (delivery) are
resource networkers
2/3 of jobs are known through private channels/some of the most
valuable insights are locked-in these channels
Understand network topology /hubs and links
Know the most people; know the right people; know the most people
who know the right people

20. Networking
Understand value networking versus utility networking
Attitude matters: What can this person do for me? (utility) vs How
can I help this person in some way? (value)
Networking is not “working a room”
Prepare for networking/social media tools such as Twitter and
Linkedin can be very useful

21. Source: http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/network

22. Source: http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/network

23. Source: http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/network

25. “The core skill of an innovator is error
recovery, not failure avoidance.”
- Randy Nelson, Dean of Pixar
University

26. Experimenting
Other discovery skills yield information about the past/present but
experimenting tells you something about the future.
Experimenting is seen as the best differentiator between an innovator
and a non-innovator
Experiments rarely turn out as expected/significant learning
opportunity
Virtually every disruptive business evolved through a series of
experiments (Google)

27. Experimenting
Experiments can be costly investments of time/money; maximize your
other discovery skills to reduce # of/raise quality of experiments
Practical tips for experimenting:
• Take things apart (physically/figuratively)
• Try new experiences/develop new skills
• Test new ideas or prototypes
Well-designed experiments should validate/invalidate closely-held
assumptions about the way things work

29. To design something really well you have to get it. You have
to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate
commitment to thoroughly understand something – chew it
up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the
time to do that. Creativity is just connecting things.
- Steve Jobs

30. Associating
Associational thinking is not the same thing as pattern recognition
Unlike the other four discovery skills, associating is a cognitive not a
behavioural skill
The best predictor of associating skills was how often people
engaged in the other four discovery skills
Output of other four discovery skills feed the potential for creative
associations

31. Associating
Tips for developing your associating skills:
• Zooming in and zooming out (from pixel to big picture)
• Lego thinking (think of ideas as building blocks that can be
recombined in novel configurations)
• Force new associations
• Take on the persona of a different company
• Generate metaphors
• Build your own curiosity box (IDEO); Notebooks

32. 2 common mistakes: Implementing a bad idea
and failing to act on a good one
What makes a good idea “good”?
“The best way to have a good idea is to have
a lot of ideas.” - Linus Pauling
It’s not enough to come up with an idea for
innovation, you also require the capacity to
actually implement it
The actual implemented solution rarely resembles the idea that hatched it.
“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.” -
Richard Buckminster

34. Stay in touch:
@LucLalande
http://ca.linkedin.com/in/luclalande