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Five Keys to Innovation

By December 7, 2009December 26th, 2013Training Philosophy

Professors from Harvard Business School, Insead and Brigham Young University have just completed a six-year study of more than 3,000 executives and 500 innovative entrepreneurs that identified five skills that separate the blue-sky innovators from the rest. Here are the five skills:

Associating: The ability to connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems or ideas from different fields.

Questioning: Innovators constantly ask questions that challenge the common wisdom. They ask “why?”, “why not?” and “what if?”

Observing: Discovery-driven executives scrutinize common phenomena, particularly the behavior of potential customers.

Experimenting: Innovative entrepreneurs actively try out new ideas by creating prototypes and launching pilots.

Networking: innovators go out of their way to meet people with different ideas and perspectives.

Are you an innovator or a follower?

If you want to be an innovator in the strength training field then you have to put your time in learning everything else that is out there and then decide for yourself what needs to be improved upon. You need to learn, read, watch, train yourself, and train others. You need to work hard to rise up the ranks and gain acceptance in order to improve your networking. You need to think outside the box and try new things. Most important, you need to learn how to communicate your message effectively.

Steve-Jobs

10 Comments

  • Sam says:

    I love it! Can you site the study so we all can reference it. Im sure it’d be a good read.

    This blog post is essentially utilizing the “Association” principle above. You’re showing us a study done on business careers and associating it to strength & condtioning coaches! Big time!

  • A'Mar says:

    Per your five keys, it looks like I’m an innovator. I’m not happy with the status quo -I never have been- and I’m very curious by nature; which has gotten me in trouble at times when challenging dogmatic paradigms. As a musician of over 20 years, I’ve learned to create/innovate and think outside of the box. Rather than merely accepting the answer of “it just works”, I want to know why it works, and if it can be improved upon, and/or do other methodologies/philosophies work better etc.

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