Anthony is coauthor of the new book “Eat, Sleep, Innovate: How to Make Creativity an Everyday Habit Inside Your Organization”. His book is about innovation and how organizations can make innovation a day-to-day habit. Anthony is a prolific contributor to Harvard Business Publishing. He is the most published digital author on HBR.org and is Harvard Business Corporate Learning’s most in-demand subject matter expert. Anthony’s previous books are Dual Transformation; The First Mile: A Launch Manual for Getting Great Ideas Into the Market; Seeing What’s Next: Using the Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change (with Innosight co-founder and Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen); The Innovator’s Guide to Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work; The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times; The Little Black Book of Innovation: How It Works, How to Do It; and Building a Growth Factory. Anthony is also a featured speaker on topics of innovation and growth. To learn more about how companies can identify, create and deliver disruptive innovation, and manage strategic transformation, Ray Wang, CEO and founder of a Silicon Valley-based advisory firm Constellation Research, and I invited Scott D. Anthony to our weekly show DisrupTV. Here are the key takeaways of our conversation with Anthony.
Innovators are relentlessly curious
Anthony first met Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen by taking one of his courses in his second year at Harvard. Anthony fondly shared memories of being a student in Christensen’s classes. Anthony learned many important lessons from working with professor Christensen for many years as a co-author, business partner and long-time friend. Anthony talked about a sign outside of professor Christensen’s office that read: “anomalies wanted.” Professor Christensen was relentlessly curious and always seeking to learn. He was always looking for things that didn’t fit. He wanted feedback about his research even if the conclusions were orthogonal to his findings.
The pandemic has made innovation a necessity
In his book ‘Eat, Sleep, Innovate’, Anthony talks about what innovation is, how do you exactly innovate, what prevents successful innovation, and how do you overcome these innovation barriers. Innovation is something different that creates value. There are 5 behaviors that drive innovation success. The biggest barrier for innovation success is inertia. To overcome inertia, you have habits with proven techniques from the behavior change literature.
The permanent impact of the pandemic on innovation
Anthony spoke about what he believes to be long-terms effects of the pandemic on businesses and trajectory of innovation. What will the future world look like? Anthony captured 300 trends due to the pandemic. The first accelerated trend is the adoption of digital technologies. Companies now view digital transformation as key to their survival. The second trend is the transformation of healthcare including remote treatment and monitoring and innovation at the edges. Anthony talked about income distribution and emergence of the middle class in emerging markets and disruptions and fragmentations in supply chains. Anthony spoke about post pandemic predictions about innovation opportunities. He believes we will see some amazing innovations and successful startups created at this time. The jobs to be done theory will help us identify solutions that get the job done better and where they have learned that new solutions are not good enough. Example, virtual meetings are working well and will continue. Business travel will never reach 2019 levels in the future, according to Anthony. Virtual education however is not quite at the levels we need.
The five behaviors that are most important to innovation
Innovation is something different that creates value. Anthony identifies the five behaviors that are the most critical for cultivating an innovative culture. The five behaviors are: Anthony roughly maps the behaviors to the innovation journey. He places a high emphasis on curiosity and being adept in ambiguity. Ultimately innovation is about trial and error and experimentation. You cannot simply study your way towards successful innovation. You have to design and execute against smart experiments and learn from their results what separates the innovation winners and losers.
Successful innovation is about Day One
Successful innovators manage intelligent failures
Anthony talked to us about notable failures in his career and the lessons he learned along the way. Anthony works for a firm that was co-founded by arguably the father of disruptive innovation, which means that he is very adept with ambiguity and experimentations. Anthony talked about intelligent failures. The team had clear assumptions. The team had very clear experiments that they ran. And the team was very honest with themselves, meaning if the results didn’t work, they would take the learnings out of it, and then they would stop, so that they can be better consultants and able to do even a better job the next time. I highly encourage you to watch the entire interview with Scott D. Anthony. We continued our conversation about the innovation economy and the startup ecosystems in Singapore. Anthony named a number of unicorn startups in Singapore and the changing and growing business landscape. We also talked about post pandemic predictions.
