Six Things Great Innovators Do Differently

Take a look at any successful enterprise and youll find innovation at its core. That was just as true a
hundred years ago when Henry Ford perfected the assembly line as it is today, when modern day giants
like Elon Musk bring cutting edge technology to market. Innovation, as Ive written before, is how people
come up with novel solutions to important problems.

The tricky part is that every organization faces different types of challenges. Some, like Intel, focus on
improving old technologies, while others, like MD Anderson Cancer Center, strive to make fundamental
new discoveries. There are also those that innovate business models, marketing campaigns and many
other things.

Thats why there is no one true path to innovation. There are, in fact, as many ways to innovate as
there are types of problems to solve. However, in researching my book, Mapping Innovation, I noticed
universal traits in every organization I looked at. From corporate giants to startups to world class labs,
here are the 6 things they had in common.

1. Seek Out Problems

Most people think that innovation starts out with a great idea, but the truth is that it starts with a great
problem. Whether its Steve Jobs looking for product categories that suck, or scientists exploring the
fundamental nature of the universe, every innovation starts out as a tough problem that needs to solved.

One thing I noticed about the innovators I researched is that they didnt just wait for good problems, but
they actively went searching for them. Jim Allison, who developed cancer immunotherapy, told me he
just liked figuring things out, while Charlie Bennetts interest in finding computation in the natural world
helped lead to quantum computing.

I found the same thing when I looked at organizations that are able to innovate consistently. IBM
Research has, throughout its history, set up grand challenges and searched for unresolved problems in
the marketplace. Experian has set up a special unit, called DataLabs, to seek out and solve issues its
customers are struggling with. Googles long held practice of 20% time is essentially a human powered
search engine for problems.

So hiring smart people and encouraging creativity are not enough. if you want to make your organization
more innovative, the best thing you can do is to think seriously about how you search for problems.

2. Choose Problems That Suit Your Capabilities,

Strategy And Culture
After World War II, groups of natives in the South Pacific, called cargo cults, built makeshift airstrips
complete with antennas protruding out of coconut helmets, improvised headphones and guys waving
sticks to signal airplanes in the hopes that valuable cargo would drop from the sky. They had seen
soldiers employ similar tactics and were following suit.
Of course, it never worked. Indeed, it seems more than a little bit silly. Simply setting up an airstrip is not
what causes cargo planes to fly across the world to a particular location. Anyone who would believe such
a thing is missing some very basic principles of how air travel functions. It is patently absurd.

Yet modern managers find it completely sensible to try to learn the one thing that can make you innovate
like Steve Jobs or the 5 habits that made Elon Musk an innovator. Much like cargo cults, they believe
that emulating the same tactics will yield the same results, regardless of context. Perhaps not
surprisingly, they dont fare much better than the islanders.

The truth is that your innovation strategies need to suit your capabilities, strategy and cutlure. Just
because something worked for someone else doesnt mean it will work in your organization. You need to
build your own innovation playbook.

3. Identify The Innovation Strategies Most Likely To

Solve The Problems You Face
Too often, we treat innovation as a monolith, as if every problem was the same, but thats clearly not the
case. In laboratories and factory floors, universities and coffee shops, or even over a beer after work,
people are sussing out better ways to do things. There is no monopoly on creative thought.

But that leads us to a problem: How should we go about innovation? Should we hand it over to the guys
with white lab coats? An external partner? A specialist in the field? Crowdsource it? What we need is a
clear framework for making decisions.

As I wrote in Harvard Business Review, the best way to start is by asking the right questions: (1) How
well is the problem defined? and (2) How well is the domain defined? Once youve asked those framing
questions, you can start defining a sensible way to approach the problem using the Innovation Matrix.

Show me any successful innovator and I can show you another that is just as successful and does things
very differently. The key to innovating effectively is not the objective merits of any particular strategy,
but whether that strategy addresses the problem you are trying to solve.

4. Leverage Platforms To Access Ecosystems Of

Talent, Technology and Information
Traditionally, strategy was largely seen as a game of chess in which managers sought to optimize their
value chain, maximize bargaining power with buyers and suppliers and minimize threats from new market
entrants and substitute goods. Yet today, the nature of power has changed and advantage is not
determined by what assets you control, but what you can access.

Thats why today, firms must leverage platforms to access ecosystems of talent, technology and
information. Even the internal capabilities of the largest corporate giants pale in comparison to those
which can be found outside the boundaries of an organization. As Bill Joy, put it, no matter who you are,
most of the smartest people work for someone else.

To understand how this is playing out, consider the case of Microsoft and Linux. Back in 2001, CEO Steve
Ballmer saw Linux and other open source technologies as a serious threat to its business and went so far
as to call Linux a cancer. Yet today, Microsoft not only actively participates in open source communities,
its even learned to love Linux.

Why the change of heart? It realized, as have many other tech giants, that while its difficult to compete
with an ecosystem of tens of thousands of developers, you can make a great business by accessing their
talents and building on top of their work.

5. Build A Collaborative Culture

Many thought that the digital age would lead to a more solitary existence. With so much you can access
through your computer screen, why would you need to go to an office? In fact, just the opposite has
happened. While remote work has become a reality, its much harder to go it alone than it used to be. In
fact, collaboration has become a competitive advantage.

To understand why, lets look scientists, who probably have the greatest potential to work alone. Yet they
are increasingly choosing to work in teams and those teams vastly outperform solo performers. The
journal Nature recently noted that the average scientific paper today has four times as many authors as
one did in 1950.

Collaboration was also something I repeatedly came across in my research for the book. Not only was the
point continually stressed by almost everybody I talked to, I also noticed that in response to my fact
checks my sources invariably pushed me to give more credit to others and less to themselves.

As MITs Sandy Pentland has put it, We teach people that everything that matters happens between
your ears, when in fact it actually happens between people.

6. Understand That Innovation Is A Messy Business

When we think of innovation, we often conjure up visions of Steve Jobs wowing the crowds at Macworld,
but the truth is that innovation is a messy business. Part of the problem is that we mostly see successes,
while failures often go unnoticed or are swept under the carpet. We get taken in by myths and gloss over
the realities.

Consider the case of Alexander Fleming. Many know the story of how he accidentally discovered
penicillin one day when a mold contaminated a petri dish in his lab. But few realize that his work lay
dormant for over a decade until another team of scientists saw its potential and put in the years of work
needed to engineer it into a miracle cure.

Thats why so few organizations can innovate well. It is such hard, heartbreaking work. It doesnt lend
itself to shortcuts or silver bullet solutions. Truly breakthrough innovations are never a single event, nor
are they achieved by one person, or even within a single organization. Rather, they happen when ideas
combine to solve important problems.