5 innovation behaviors that business leaders must adopt in the next normal

Scott D. Anthony is a Senior Partner at Innosight and former Managing Partner of the firm. As the leading expert on disruptive Innovation and strategic transformation, Innosight brings a unique set of lenses to growth strategy. In his more than a decade with Innosight, Scott has advised senior leaders in some of the largest companies in the world. He has extensive experience in emerging markets, particularly in India, China, and the Philippines. In 2019, Anthony was recognized as the 9th most influential management thinker by Thinkers50, a biannual ranking of global business thinkers. In 2017, he was awarded the Thinkers50 Innovation Award, which recognizes the world's leading thinker on innovation.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.