Читать книгу Summary: The Innovator’s DNA. Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators. Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, Clayton Christensen - Smart Reading, Ольга Ганкова - Страница 4

Discovery Skill No. 1. Associating

Associating happens as the brain tries to synthesize and make sense of novel inputs. It helps innovators discover new directions by making connections across seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas. Innovative breakthroughs most often happen when diverse disciplines and fields, which ordinarily people would never guess to combine, indeed intersect.

To understand how associating works and why some people excel at it more than others, we need to understand how the brain works. Information in the brain is organized in a completely different way than in a dictionary, where words are arranged in alphabetical order, owing to which you will always find the word "theater" among words that begin with the letter T. In the human brain, this word is associated not only with words starting with the letter T, but also with other information points. Some associations are logical: "Bolshoi", "entr’acte" or "opening night". Others are less obvious, such as "kissing", "career", or "anxiety". The more diverse information stored in the brain is, the more associations arise during the "uploading" of fresh information. New knowledge triggers associating, which leads to the creation of innovative ideas. The associating muscle can be developed through active questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting.

You can stimulate associating using the following methods:

▶Creating unusual combinations – innovators often try to combine seemingly completely unrelated ideas and create unique combinations. They make pairs, triplets, and quadruplets of ideas, asking the questions: "What if we put this and that together?" or "… mix this, this and this with that one?" They think differently, while fearlessly creating unfamiliar combinations of ideas.

Google founder Larry Page combined two completely different ideas – Science citation and Internet searches – to launch Google. As a graduate student at Stanford, Page knew that scientific journals rank scientists by the number of citations in the past year. He realized that if Google sorted websites in the same way (by most visited), then Internet users would get more user-friendly search results.

▶Zoom in and out – innovative entrepreneurs often dive deep into the details to see the specifics of the customer experience, and "take a bird’s eye view" to see how the details fit into the big picture.

Steve Jobs used the "zoom in" approach when he worked with his team on the design of the first Macintosh computer. He went to a shopping center and carefully studied various plastic devices. One day he saw a food processor, which gave him the idea for a design of a computer. Jobs also used the "zoom out" method. The creation of the famous iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and iPad would hardly have been possible without the Apple founder’s departure from his company and the subsequent acquisition and successful management of Pixar. Thus, Jobs managed to see the media industry as a whole, studied Apple from with an outside-looking-in vantage point, and only after that was he able to create many breakthrough projects.