The Innovator’s DNA

Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators

The Innovator’s DNA emerged from an eight-year collaborative study in which we sought to uncover the origins of innovative—and often disruptive— business ideas. So we interviewed nearly a hundred inventors of revolutionary products and services, as well as founders and CEOs of game-changing companies built on innovative business ideas. Our goal was to understand as much about these people as possible, including the moment (when and how) they came up with the creative ideas that launched new products or businesses. As we reflected on the interviews, we identified five discovery skills that distinguish innovative entrepreneurs and executives from ordinary managers:

  • Associating—drawing connections between questions, problems, or ideas from unrelated fields
  • Questioning—posing queries that challenge common wisdom
  • Observing—scrutinizing the behavior of customers, suppliers, and competitors to identify new ways of doing things
  • Networking—meeting people with different ideas and perspectives
  • Experimenting—constructing interactive experiences and provoking unorthodox responses to see what insights emerge

When engaged in consistently, these actions—questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting—triggered associational thinking to deliver new businesses, products, services, and/or processes. Most of us think creativity is an entirely cognitive skill; it all happens in the brain. A critical insight from our research is that one’s ability to generate innovative ideas is not merely a function of the mind, but also a function of behaviors. This is good news for us all because it means that if we change our behaviors, we can improve our creative impact. By completing an Innovator’s DNA assessment, you can better understand your personal innovation skill strengths and learn how to make them even better.

Selected Praise for The Innovator’s DNA

“Businesses worldwide have been guided and influenced by The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution. Now The Innovator’s DNA shows where it all starts. This book gives you the fundamental building blocks for becoming more innovative and changing the world. One of the most important books to come out this year, and one that will remain pivotal reading for years to come.”
-MARC BENIOFF, Chairman and CEO, salesforce.com; author, Behind the Cloud.

“Having worked with Clayton Christensen on innovation for over a decade, I can see that The Innovator’s DNA continues to stretch our thinking with insights that challenge convention and enable progress in the important cause of innovation . . . so critical to competitiveness and growth.”
-A.G. LAFLEY, retired Chairman of the Board and CEO, The Procter & Gamble Company

“The Innovator’s DNA sheds new light on the once-mysterious art of innovation by showing that successful innovators exhibit common behavioral habits—habits that can boost anyone’s creative capacity.”
-STEPHEN R. COVEY, author, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and The Leader in Me

“The Innovator’s DNA is the ‘how to’ manual to innovation, and to the fresh thinking that is the root of innovation. It has dozens of simple tricks that any person and any team can use today to discover the fresh ideas to solve the important problems. Buy it now and read it tonight. Tomorrow you will learn more, create more, inspire more.”
-SCOTT D. COOK, Chairman of the Executive Committee, Intuit Inc.

“Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton Christensen’s book on the Innovator’s DNA really rings true to me. Their description of the five skills possessed by innovators is spot on. Innovators at their core want to find new ways of doing things and actively question, observe, experiment, and network to generate innovative ideas.”  
-MARK GOTTFREDSON, Partner at Bain & Company, and author of The Breakthrough Imperative

“The Innovator’s DNA shines a new light on the once mysterious art of innovation and finds that successful innovators exhibit common behaviors, which anyone can learn to do. I’ve been at a loss to explain how I come up with new ideas, but this work is a great start in understanding how innovators behave and how those behaviors serve our ability to ‘think different’.”   
-ELIOT JACOBSEN, Founding Partner, RocketFuel Ventures

“The book is easy to read, jammed with examples and, at a time when innovation is a beacon, offers an interesting model to consider.”
-HARVEY SCHACHTER, Columnist for Canada’s number-one daily newspaper, Globe and Mail

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