Innovator’s DNA, Updated, with a New Preface: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, Hardcover – June 4, 2019, reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of Innovator’s DNA, Updated, with a New Preface: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, Hardcover – June 4, 2019, available from Amazon here.

A new classic, recommended by leaders and media around the world

In this bestselling book, authors Jeff Dyer (Innovation Capital and The Innovator’s Method), Hal Gregersen (Questions Are the Answer), and Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator’s Dilemma, The Innovator’s Solution, and How Will You Measure Your Life?) build on what we know about disruptive innovation to show how individuals can develop the skills necessary to move progressively from idea to impact.

By identifying the winning behaviors of the world’s best innovators–from leaders at Amazon and Apple to those at Google, Tesla, and Salesforce–Dyer, Gregersen, and Christensen outline five discovery skills that distinguish innovative entrepreneurs and executives from ordinary managers: associating, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting.

Through real-world stories, the authors show you how to evaluate and develop your own innovator’s “DNA code,” including advice for how you can use the five skills to generate ideas, collaborate with colleagues to implement them, and sharpen your organization’s competitive edge by building innovation skills into its culture. This innovation advantage will translate into a premium in your company’s stock price–an innovation premium–which is possible only by building the code for innovation right into your organization’s people, processes, and guiding philosophies. This book shows you how.

Now updated with a new preface and fresh examples, The Innovator’s DNA is more than ever the essential resource for individuals, managers, and teams who want to strengthen their innovative prowess.

Innovator’s DNA, Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators reviewed

This book first came out eight years ago, this second edition builds on the insights there and adds in new elements. The authors have a great pedigree in their own innovation based research, with Clayton Christensen especially pushing the envelope with his series of books on disruption and innovation. Consequently for this book all three authors have been able to leverage their own impressive address books to draw on interviews and insights from a range of the most dynamic and innovative CEOs of current high performing companies.

The goal is to capture these entrepreneurial insights and to assess what made them successful, both as leaders and also as companies. The ability to keep asking ‘why’ and looking to dig deeper into why things worked or more importantly often why they were not working. The Jeff Bezos example of digging deeply into a shop floor accident was instructive too, as it moved beyond looking to blame individuals to instead the systemic reasons for the problem arising.

Amazon of course has its pros and cons but having worked with several deeply average to worse managers whose mantra was to cover their arse first and then blame others, this was a positive alternative approach (which probably explains why my boss got fired and Bezos is one of the richest people in the world).

The book is well written and accessible so it is easy to get useful and actionable insights from your time spent reading it. If you are looking for ways to improve your own companies performance then it won’t be time wasted reading this book.

More information about Irish Tech News and the Business Showcase

FYI the ROI for you is => We now get over 1.5 million monthly views, and up to 900k monthly unique visitors, from over 160 countries. We have over 860,000 relevant followers on Twitter on our various accounts & were recently described as Ireland’s leading online tech news site and Ireland’s answer to TechCrunch, so we can offer you a good audience!

Since introducing desktop notifications a short time ago, which notify readers directly in their browser of new articles being published, over 16000 people have now signed up to receive them ensuring they are instantly kept up to date on all our latest content. Desktop notifications offer a unique method of serving content directly to verified readers and bypass the issue of content getting lost in people’s crowded news feeds.

Drop us a line if you want to be featured, guest post, suggest a possible interview, or just let us know what you would like to see more of in our future articles. We’re always open to new and interesting suggestions for informative and different articles. Contact us, by email, twitter or whatever social media works for you.

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at Simon@IrishTechNews.ie or on Twitter: @SimonCocking