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Innovator's DNA, The: Mastering The Five Skills Of Disruptive Innovators (2012)

by Jeffrey Dyer(Favorite Author)

3.94 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1455892351 (ISBN13: 9781455892358)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Brilliance Audio

review 1: With exemplar innovators and successful innovating companies examples this books dwells on the whys and hows of their essence as innovation agents in under to help the reader understand what needs to be done to be an effective innovator. The book is divided into two chapters, one for individuals and one for companies. The regular reader may find the insights useful and might want to incorporate a couple of suggestions into their life. However, as most management books, the ideas and suggestions seem to be oriented more to the director of projects/divisions and CEOs. The book, probably the final chapter of Christensen’s “Innovator’s Trilogy”, fits in a fresh category of innovation books that talk about people behind innovation rather than innovation itself.The resu... morelt of an “eight-year collaborative study” reveals some of the personality treats of the top innovators and the innovation processes followed by top innovation companies. The first part of the book presents the reader with five skills identified by the authors as “distinguishing innovators from typical executives”. The second analyses these skills put into practice in the business environment from three perspectives: people, process and philosophies. Success innovation stories of individuals are used as examples to highlight how a particular skill helped a particular innovator come up with a particular product or service. Be prepared to dive into the mind of Steve Jobs, Mike Lazaridis, Michael Dell and other prominent figures of the innovation world. In the second section, the stories help you understand the big picture: that is how the five skills come together and define the kind of people that work in a company, how the company manages its processes and what the companies’ philosophy towards innovations are. Examples of real companies serve as introduction to each to the discussions. As soon as you start reading you can see the “Halo Effect” (Phil McKinney) shine over this book. Although the authors claim that their method to find innovative companies is more accurate than just picking the Business Week’s annual ranking of innovative companies, it still generates some doubts. Their measure, “innovation prowess”, based on the firm’s market value vs. the cash flow attributed to current businesses seems to lack a validation that the difference can be only attributed to investors expecting the company to get future profits from innovation. What other factors may affect investors? Where this factors taken into account and balanced out during ranking? These issues are not addressed in the book. Innovators where asked to fill a survey and the results used to identify the differences between innovators and non-innovators in the five innovation skills. Percentiles in the scores are used to back up the points and findings described in the book. Are the differences between innovators and non-innovators significantly different? Don’t get me wrong, the argument of the book is interesting and well-structured and gives an interesting view of innovation, it is just not clear enough if the data fully backs the argument.As with Beyond the Obvious you will probably find the chapter about questioning one of the most educational. The four tactic questioning can prove to be a valuable tool when thinking out of the box and finding new, innovative, products. If you ever left a classroom or conference feeling that you should have raised your hand and asked that question, then you will find the side note about “willing to look stupid” most insightful. Questioning in order to see beyond your present and to challenge the status quo can be the most important tool in an innovator’s tool set. If you are into process, marketing or other type of area that is not product development you are in for a treat. Although sometimes used as small examples, innovations that are not products seems to be regarded as not as innovative as a product. How the skills can be applied to innovations in other areas is completely disregarded. Another interesting point is that the book excels at demonstrating success examples. But what of how did these innovators tackled failure? How to explain when one of their skills failed and led them to slow or not reaction at all? The networking chapter starts with the example on how Lazardis’ networking helped him shift RIM from LED panels to two-way pagers, later BlackBerry. But what happen to this networking as RIM started to lose ground against smart phones? Innovators need to have the courage to innovate and know that making a change “makes it much easier to take smart risks, make mistakes, and most of all, learn quickly for them”. But how are the five skills key to learn from mistakes? Are there other skills needed to identify mistakes, accept defeat and learn from the process?If you want to know what famous innovators like Steve Jobs, Ratan Tata and Mark Benioff, think about innovation and how do they continue to innovate this is the book for you. You will probably find that it can be actually too much. It is somehow sad that if they have interviews from 24 innovators, most of the quotations and views come from 5 or 6 of them. Did the authors found that after their selection process the interviews revealed that the rest were not as innovative as they thought? Or is the halo over this elite set of innovators that other views seem unimportant? I definitively recommend reading this book and adding it to your innovation consult list, but use a pair of tongs when it comes to read the data that supports some of the arguments.
review 2: I love every book I've ever read written by Clayton Christensen. This book describes five characteristics that all innovators share in common: Associating, Questioning, Observing, Networking, and Experimenting. I would like to develop these skills to help me in my career. After the first section of individual skills developed by innovators, he lists out companies that share this same DNA structure and are able to innovate in the marketplace. I found this book, like all the other Christensen books, very intriguing. less

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