Five Core Skills Required to Be A Disruptive Innovator - Fast Company - Kaihan Krippendorff

At a McKinsey alumni webcast on creative strategy last week, the presenters mentioned a book due to be soon published by INSEAD professor Hal Gregersen, Jeffrey Dyer of Brigham Young University and Clayton Christensen of Harvard. The authors have spent six years interviewing thousands of innovative businesspeople and concluded there are five key traits innovators share (the Innovator's DNA as they call it). Whenever I hear numbers like "six years" and "thousands of interviews," I grow a bit skeptical. That's usually academic code for "If I think about every conversation I can remember..." But their conclusions suggest some interesting New Year's resolutions for those wishing to make 2011 a more innovative year.

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Why Focusing on Finding “The Next Big Thing” Doesn't Work - The Media Brief UK

You want innovation? You can’t handle innovation. Seriously though, once they’re established, most companies are geared toward stability, not disrupting their own operations. Newspaper and magazine companies are no different. And print media had no real impetus to change radically until recently. Newspapers and magazines took the challenge from television and radio in its stride – but it took the combined impact of multi-channel television, video games and the internet to challenge print media’s dominance. But if you thought the last five years were disruptive, brace yourself for the next five.

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The Three Types of Innovation Failure That Are Intolerable - Scott Anthony - Harvard Business Review

I read with interest David Simms' recent post about the power of positive failure. I of course agree with the general perspective — given the probabilistic nature of innovation, failure isn't always a bad thing, and all things being equal, you'd support someone who has tried, failed, and learned over someone who has never tried. The interesting thing to me is that this isn't a particularly new perspective. Failure has long been a badge of honor in Silicon Valley; thought leaders like Henry Mitnzberg, Rita McGrath, and Tim Brown note how failure is an essential part of successful innovation. Yet, in most organizations a fear of failure persists.

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