Order your essay today — written by real experts, guaranteed plagiarism-free, and ready to impress your professor!
The DNA of Disruptive Innovators
The Five Discovery Skills That Enable Innovative Leaders to “Think Different”
Need Help Writing an Essay?
Tell us about your assignment and we will find the best writer for your paper.
Write My Essay For MeExcerpted from
The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators
By
Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton M. Christensen
Buy the book: Amazon
Barnes & Noble HBR.org
Harvard Business Review Press Boston, Massachusetts
ISBN-13: 978-1-4221-8373-1
8369BC
For the exclusive use of Y. Zhang, 2019.
This document is authorized for use only by Yijia Zhang in ENTR 2301 Ruth 2 taught by Ruth Raubitschek, Northeastern University from Jan 2019 to Jul 2019.http://hbr.org/product/the-innovator-s-dna-mastering-the-five-skills-of-d/an/14946-HBK-ENG??referral=00281&cm_mmc=npv-_-Chapters-_-2010-_-http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1422134814/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=harvabusin-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399373&creativeASIN=1422134814http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/innovators-dna-jeff-dyer/1100744423?ean=9781422134818&itm=2&usri=innovator%2bs%2bdnahttp://hbr.org/product/the-innovator-s-dna-mastering-the-five-skills-of-d/an/14946-HBK-ENG??referral=00281&cm_mmc=npv-_-Chapters-_-2010-_-
Copyright 2011 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
This chapter was originally published as chapter 1 of The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators,
copyright 2011 Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton M. Christensen.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for
permission should be directed to permissions@hbsp.harvard.edu, or mailed to Permissions, Harvard Business School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02163.
You can purchase Harvard Business Review Press books at booksellers worldwide. You can order Harvard Business Review Press books and book chapters online at www.hbr.org/books,
or by calling 888-500-1016 or, outside the U.S. and Canada, 617-783-7410.
For the exclusive use of Y. Zhang, 2019.
This document is authorized for use only by Yijia Zhang in ENTR 2301 Ruth 2 taught by Ruth Raubitschek, Northeastern University from Jan 2019 to Jul 2019.mailto:permissions@hbsp.harvard.eduwww.hbr.org/books
1
The DNA of Disruptive Innovators
“I want to put a ding in the universe.”
—Steve Jobs, founder and CEO,
Apple Inc.
DO I KNOW HOW to generate innovative, evendisruptive, business ideas? Do I know how to find creative people or how to train people to think outside the
box? These questions stump most senior executives, who know
that the ability to innovate is the “secret sauce” of business success.
Unfortunately, most of us know very little about what makes one
person more creative than another. Perhaps for this reason, we
stand in awe of visionary entrepreneurs such as Apple’s Steve Jobs,
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and eBay’s Pierre Omidyar, and innovative
executives like P&G’s A. G. Lafley, Bain & Company’s Orit Gadiesh,
and eBay’s Meg Whitman. How do these people come up with
groundbreaking new ideas? If it were possible to discover the inner
1
For the exclusive use of Y. Zhang, 2019.
This document is authorized for use only by Yijia Zhang in ENTR 2301 Ruth 2 taught by Ruth Raubitschek, Northeastern University from Jan 2019 to Jul 2019.
DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION STARTS WITH YOU
workings of the masters’ minds, what could the rest of us learn
about how innovation really happens?
Ideas for Innovation
Consider the case of Jobs, who was recently ranked the world’s
number-one best-performing CEO in a study published by
Harvard Business Review.1 You may recall Apple’s famous “Think
Different” ad campaign, whose slogan says it all. The campaign
featured innovators from different fields, including Albert Einstein,
Picasso, Richard Branson, and John Lennon, but Jobs’s face might
easily have been featured among the others. After all, everyone
knows that Jobs is an innovative guy, that he knows how to think
different. But the question is, just how does he do it? Indeed, how
does any innovator think different?
The common answer is that the ability to think creatively is ge-
netic. Most of us believe that some people, like Jobs, are simply
born with creative genes, while others are not. Innovators are sup-
posedly right brained, meaning that they are genetically endowed
with creative abilities. The rest of us are left brained—logical,
linear thinkers, with little or no ability to think creatively.
If you believe this, we’re going to tell you that you are largely
wrong. At least within the realm of business innovation, virtually
everyone has some capacity for creativity and innovative thinking.
Even you. So using the example of Jobs, let’s explore this ability to
think different. How did Jobs come up with some of his innovative
ideas in the past? And what does his journey tell us?
Innovative Idea #1: Personal Computers
Should Be Quiet and Small
One of the key innovations in the Apple II, the computer that
launched Apple, came from Jobs’s decision that it should be quiet.
His conviction resulted, in part, from all the time he’d spent
2
For the exclusive use of Y. Zhang, 2019.
This document is authorized for use only by Yijia Zhang in ENTR 2301 Ruth 2 taught by Ruth Raubitschek, Northeastern University from Jan 2019 to Jul 2019.
The DNA of Disruptive Innovators
studying Zen and meditating.2 He found the noise of a computer
fan distracting. So Jobs was determined that the Apple II would
have no fan, which was a fairly radical notion at the time. Nobody
else had questioned the need for a fan because all computers
required a fan to prevent overheating. Getting rid of the fan
wouldn’t be possible without a different type of power supply that
generated less heat.
So Jobs went on the hunt for someone who could design a new
power supply. Through his network of contacts, he found Rod
Holt, a forty-something, chain-smoking socialist from the Atari
crowd.3 Pushed by Jobs, Holt abandoned the fifty-year-old con-
ventional linear unit technology and created a switching power
supply that revolutionized the way power was delivered to elec-
tronics products. Jobs’s pursuit of quiet and Holt’s ability to de-
liver an innovative power supply that didn’t need a fan made the
Apple II the quietest and smallest personal computer ever made
(a smaller computer was possible because it didn’t need extra space
for the fan).
Had Jobs never asked, “Why does a computer need a fan?” and
“How do we keep a computer cool without a fan?” the Apple com-
puter as we know it would not exist.
Innovative Idea #2: The Macintosh User Interface,
Operating System, and Mouse
The seed for the Macintosh, with its revolutionary operating
system, was planted when Jobs visited Xerox PARC in 1979. Xerox,
the copier company, created the Palo Alto Research Center
(PARC), a research lab charged with designing the office of the
future. Jobs wrangled a visit to PARC in exchange for offering
Xerox an opportunity to invest in Apple. Xerox didn’t know how
to capitalize on the exciting things going on at PARC, but Jobs did.
Jobs carefully observed the PARC computer screen filled with
icons, pull-down menus, and overlapping windows—all controlled
3
For the exclusive use of Y. Zhang, 2019.
This document is authorized for use only by Yijia Zhang in ENTR 2301 Ruth 2 taught by Ruth Raubitschek, Northeastern University from Jan 2019 to Jul 2019.
DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION STARTS WITH YOU
by the click of a mouse.“What we saw was incomplete and flawed,”
Jobs said,“but the germ of the idea was there . . . within ten minutes
it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this.”4 He
spent the next five years at Apple leading the design team that would
produce the Macintosh computer, the first personal computer with
a graphical user interface (GUI) and mouse. Oh, and he saw some-
thing else during the PARC visit. He got his first taste of object-
oriented programming, which became the key to the OSX operating
system that Apple acquired from Jobs’s other start-up, NeXT Com-
puters. What if Jobs had never visited Xerox PARC to observe what
was going on there?
Innovative Idea #3: Desktop Publishing on the Mac
The Macintosh, with its LaserWriter printer, was the first computer
to bring desktop publishing to the masses. Jobs claims that the
“beautiful typography” available on the Macintosh would never
have been introduced if he hadn’t dropped in on a calligraphy class
at Reed College in Oregon. Says Jobs:
Reed College offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruc-
tion in the country. Throughout the campus every poster,
every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand-
calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have
to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy
