I was fascinated by a recent Harvard Business Review (HBR) article on how to innovate (an abstract is here with the option to purchase).
They researched such innovators as Apple’s Steve Jobs, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, eBay’s Pierre Omidyar and Meg Whitman, Intuit’s Scott Cook and Proctor & Gamble’s A.G. Lafley.
Their key finding was that innovative entrepreneurs (who are also CEOs) spend 50% more time on five “discovery activities” than do CEOs with no track record for innovation.
I fully agree with these five tips for how to innovate; and want to provide my insights on them:
HBR points out that Michael Dell famously created Dell with the question:
“Why do computers cost five times the cost of the sum of their parts?”
Innovators are excellent at asking questions that challenge the status quo such as:
Innovators are strong at observing people and details. …