Five Skills to Support Innovative Thinking

08/03/2018

Five Skills to Support Innovative Thinking

You decide to do something, perform one small action, and suddenly it's a tide, the momentum is going, and there's no possibility of turning back. Somehow, even though you thought you foresaw all that would happen, you didn't know the pace would pick up so.
Amanda Cross

“Disruptive innovators — the likes of entrepreneurial masterminds Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Pierre Omidyar — think and behave differently. They possess a suite of skills that enable them to connect dots that the rest of us don’t usually perceive,” writes Erica Swallow in a Forbes article.

“But are some of us born innovators and the rest of us just hopeless? Hal Gregersen, senior affiliate professor of leadership at INSEAD and co-author of ‘The Innovator’s DNA,’ believes that there are five key skills that disruptive innovators possess: the cognitive skill of associating and the behavioral skills of questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting. And yes, all of us can learn to flex these innovator’s muscles, Gregersen told me.”

Source: “Can Innovative Thinking Be Learned?,” Erica Swallow, Forbes magazine, April 19, 2012

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