Innovation is not innate but we know that it can be bloody difficult. Like other complex skill sets, facets can be learned according to a new study.
In an article published in December's Harvard Business Review the researchers identified five skills that separate the blue-sky innovators from the rest -- skills they labeled associating, questioning, observing, experimenting and discovering....
"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."
Does this tell us how to innovate? No. the study provides psychological insight into how adaptive behaviours can aid entrepreneurs in particular contexts. Now can we wed this to content: what do they know and how do we extend that knowledge? How many innovations are learned and lost? What is owed to co-operation and competition? If innovation is so easy, then why is it so hard in practice?