Five Keys to Innovation

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.

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