The Innovator's DNA

Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen and Clayton Christensen studied innovative entrepreneurs and executives to identify what they do differently, and this book reports the findings. The method combined interviews with several hundred innovators and a survey instrument administered to a much larger population.

They identify five discovery skills. Associating, meaning connecting questions and ideas from unrelated fields, which they treat as the central skill that the other four feed. Questioning, meaning asking why and why not persistently and challenging the assumptions everyone in a field shares. Observing, meaning watching customers and processes closely rather than surveying them. Networking, meaning deliberately seeking out people with different expertise rather than people with similar backgrounds. And experimenting, meaning building and testing rather than analysing.

Their central empirical claim is that these are behaviours rather than traits, that they can be practised and developed, and that innovative organisations institutionalise them through hiring, processes and culture. They report that innovative chief executives spend substantially more time on these activities than their peers. The methodology has the usual problems of research on successful people: the sample is selected on the outcome, self-reported behaviour is unreliable, and the comparison group is not well specified. The behaviours themselves are plausible and the practical exercises are usable. Readers should treat the quantitative claims about how much these skills explain with scepticism.

Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School 1992-2020; co-founder of Innosight, Rose Park Advisors and the Clayton Christensen Institute; died 23 January 2020

The Innovator's Dilemma turned disruption into a primary framework that the rest of the strategy and innovation literature argues with rather than around.

Harvard Business School, Innosight, Rose Park Advisors, Clayton Christensen Institute