Companies suffer when the boss comes up with all the new ideas. Shrewd leaders build organizations that think for themselves.

These firms set the pace when it comes to generating new growth ideas.

"How do I find innovative people for my organization? And how can I become more innovative myself?" These are questions that stump most senior executives, who know that the ability to innovate is the "secret sauce" of business success. Perhaps for this reason most of us stand in awe of the work of visionary entrepreneurs such as Apple's Steve Jobs, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, eBay's Pierre Omidyar, and P&G's A.G. Lafley. How do these individuals come up with groundbreaking new ideas?In this article, Dyer, of Brigham Young University; Gregersen, of Insead; and Christensen, of Harvard Business School, reveal how innovative entrepreneurs differ from typical executives. Their study demonstrates that five "discovery skills" distinguish the most creative executives: Associating helps them discover new directions by making connections among seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas. Questioning allows innovators to break out of the status quo and consider new ideas. Through observing, innovators carefully and consistently look out for small behavioral details - in the activities of customers, suppliers, and other companies - to gain insights about new ways of doing things. In experimenting, they relentlessly try on new experiences and explore the world. And through networking with diverse individuals from an array of backgrounds, they gain radically different perspectives.

There is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order and only lukewarm defenders by all those who could profit by the new order. This lukewarmness arises from the incredulity of mankind who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience with it.

This study traces the origins of innovative strategies by examining the attributes of 'innovative entrepreneurs.' In an inductive grounded theory study of innovative entrepreneurs, we develop a theory that innovative entrepreneurs differ from executives on four behavioral patterns through which they acquire information: (1) questioning; (2) observing; (3) experimenting; and (4) idea networking. We develop operational measures of each of these behaviors and find significant differences between innovative entrepreneurs and executives in a large sample survey of 72 successful and unsuccessful innovative entrepreneurs and 310 executives. Drawing on network theory, we develop a theory of entrepreneurial opportunity recognition that explains why these behaviors increase the probability of generating an idea for an innovative venture. We contend that one's ability to generate novel ideas for innovative new businesses is a function of one's behaviors that trigger cognitive processes to produce novel business ideas. We also posit that innovative entrepreneurs are less susceptible to the status quo bias and engage in these information-seeking behaviors with a motivation to change the status quo. Copyright (C) 2009 Strategic Management Society.

Foreword xix Preface xxi Chapter 1: The Challenge of Leading Strategic Change 1 Chapter 2: Barrier #1: Failure to See 21 Chapter 3: Solutions and Tools for Breaking through Barrier #1: Helping People See the Need 43 Chapter 4: Barrier #2: Failure to Move 61 Chapter 5: Solutions and Tools for Breaking through Barrier #2: Helping People Make the Move 71 Chapter 6: Barrier #3: Failure to Finish 85 Chapter 7: Solutions and Tools for Breaking through Barrier #3: Helping People Fight through the Finish 99 Chapter 8: Pulling It All Together 111 Chapter 9: Getting Ahead of the Change Curve 143 Index 155