What Are The 5 Secrets Of Innovation?

What does it take to be truly innovative? Researchers from Harvard Business School, Insead and Brigham Young University have just completed a lengthy study of thousands of successful entrepreneurs and executives that looked at what behaviors lead to innovation.

CNN reports:

One of the men behind the study, Insead’s Hal Gregersen, told CNN, “What the innovators have in common is that they can put together ideas and information in unique combinations that nobody else has quite put together before.”

The researchers describe this ability to connect ideas as “associating,” and say it’s key to innovators’ ability to think outside the box. But they add that the secret to how the great innovators think is the way they act.

“The way they act is to observe actively, like an anthropologist, and they talk to incredibly diverse people with different world views, who can challenge their assumptions,”Gregersen told CNN.

“For them, everything is to be experimented upon — for example, if they walk into a bookstore and they’re used to reading history they might try psychology. All these behaviors are powerfully enhanced by a capacity to ask provocative, challenging questions of the world around them.”

Because the ability to think differently comes from acting differently, Gregersen says anyone can become a better innovator, just by acting like one.

CNN: “Learn the five secrets of innovation”

[via The Cool Commentator]

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