Jeff Dyer

What distinguishes individuals who emerge as effective leaders of innovation? It’s not just being creative or the quality of their ideas. Nikola Tesla was arguably a more brilliant inventor than Thomas Edison; but Edison realized tremendous commercial success while Tesla died penniless. Edison not only developed world-changing ideas, but he also acquired resources in a competitive market to execute and commercialize them. Jeff Dyer says that success hinges on building “innovation capital” through effective leadership. This entails building your “human capital” skills of forward thinking, proactive problem solving and persuasion. To put your ideas into action, you also need “innovative social capital” – a network of influencers, financial benefactors and organization leaders who can help build and promote your brand, product or service. Finally, you need “innovative reputation capital” – the credibility and notoriety that motivates organizational leaders and investors to trust you with their money, and consumers to eagerly await your next idea. Without the network and reputation, your vision will remain an unfulfilled wish.

Based on his book “Innovation Capital: How to Compete – and Win – Like the World’s Most Innovative Leaders” (HBR Press, June 2019), Dyer and his co-authors, through in-depth interviews, unlocks the secrets of how the world’s most successful and well-known CEOs – including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Tesla’s Elon Musk and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff – journeyed from their initial idea stage to being touchstones for innovation and dynamism. For entrepreneurs and creative managers, Dyer’s accumulation of wisdom from these towering figures is an invaluable resource in learning how to forge your own innovation capital, and walk in their footsteps.

For most of us, innovation isn’t a natural mindset, but it can be learned. Drawing from his award-winning research with the late Clayton Christensen, professor Jeff Dyer describes how anyone can become a more creative problem solver and effective leader of innovation. Successful innovators exhibit common behavioral habits; he identifies the five discovery skills – associating, questioning, observing, networking and experimenting – proven to distinguish innovative entrepreneurs and executives from execution-focused, results-driven managers. But innovation isn’t a one-person job, he stresses, it’s a team game. Professor Dyer details the behavior changes necessary to build innovation capacity into the very fabric of your organization.

Innovation has become synonymous with small, agile and social – but that doesn’t mean bigger, more established companies can’t innovate successfully, says professor Jeff Dyer. It’s about being lean and maniacally focused on fast and frugal experimentation. Taking a page from start-up culture, he offers a new perspective derived from the world of the lean and agile start-up. Based on his most recent best-selling book, Professor Dyer details the innovator’s method, an end-to-end process for creating, refining and bringing ideas to market. He shows when and how to apply the tools and strategies of the method, and how to adapt them to your business to jump-start – and sustain – innovation.