If we can assume creativity leads to innovation, and innovation, applied appropriately, leads to revenue, there's a lot riding on insurance execs having that skill set. Examples from other industries prove the value of an innovative leader: consider Amazon's Jeff Bezos or Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, whose serial innovations vaulted them and their companies skyward.
Yet, according to Brigham Young University, this skill set is not necessarily inherent in the executive suite. In fact, the most innovative CEOs spend 50% more time practicing five specific innovation skills than do their less creative counterparts. This revelation surfaced when three prominent business scholars released the results of a 6-year study that asked famous and non-famous executives how they came up with their best insights.
"Most executives view creativity and innovation as a 'black box,' or something other people are good at, but they don't know how to do it themselves," said Jeffrey Dyer, lead author on the study and a professor at Brigham Young University's Marriott School of Management, Provo, Utah. Dyer and his co-authors, Hal Gregersen of INSEAD, New York, and Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School, Cambridge, Mass., surveyed more than 3,000 executives and 500 individuals who had started innovative companies or invented new products.
"In almost every case, they could describe engaging in a behavior before having the idea," said Dyer. "Something they had watched, someone they had talked to, some sort of experiment they had conducted, or some question they had asked, was the trigger for the idea."
In analyzing the results, five "discovery skills" emerged:
1. Questioning: Innovative executives ask more questions than do their peers; questions that challenge the status quo. "Asking why or why not, and what if, spurs creative thinking," Dyer says.
2. Observing: Executives who can innovate apply an action-oriented attitude to observation. They tend to observe potential customers, and how they experience a product or service. "They tend to focus on learning what's different than they expected," adds Dyer.
3. Experimenting: Innovative executives seek training outside their expertise. They take apart a product or process just to see how it works, and tend to develop discovery skills. "Using discovery skills not only helps people in their present challenges," notes Dyer, "it prepares them for equally interesting (but qualitatively different) challenges later."
4. Networking: Rather than network to gain access to resources or to market themselves, innovative executives connect with others simply to find and test new ideas, points out Dyer.
5. Associating: Connecting seemingly unrelated questions and ideas is the skill that brings all the others together, Dyer explains. In fact, associating is triggered by new knowledge that is acquired through questioning, observing, experimenting and networking.
So if being innovative isn't the result of a genetic endowment, but rather a skill set that can be developed with training, perhaps practice makes perfect.
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