David A. Owens is professor of the practice of management at Vanderbilt’s Graduate School of Management, where he also directs the Executive Development Institute. Specializing in innovation and new product development, he is known as a dynamic speaker and is the recipient of numerous teaching awards. In this interview, we discuss his new book Creative People Must Be Stopped.
Creative People Must Be Stopped shows how individuals and organizations sabotage their own best intentions to encourage “outside the box” thinking. It shows that the antidote to this self-defeating behavior is to identify which of the six major types of constraints are hindering innovation: individual, group, organizational, industry-wide, societal, or technological. Once innovators and other leaders understand exactly which constraints are working against them and how to overcome them, they can create conditions that foster innovation instead of stopping it in its tracks.
[Producer's Note: We apologize for the slight audio problems in this interview. We'll be hard at work resolving the issue...once we figure out what caused it.]
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Should this be episode 0303? I recall having listened to episode 0302 with Marcus Buckingham.
Sam, you are correct. Sorry for the confusion.
David,
Thanks for sharing this interview.
I had not thought much about the difference between creativity and innovation before. And I liked your question about what managers can do to remove the constraints to innovation.
Also, I think that one reason corporations don’t embrace innovation is that as a very general rule (not always, of course, as Apple has shown) leaders/managers in corporations are much more conservative than entrepreneurs.
One of their primary concerns is not losing their jobs and “threatening” the products or services that are currently making the company money with new ideas can be viewed upon very unfavorably.
Managers get a bad rap in this regard. On some level, it’s their job to judge ideas and decide which ones have potential. The challenge is that perhaps judgment is best delayed in many case. Thanks for the comment.
That’s a really good point. All of the times that it was a good decision to not take action are typically not mentioned. But the mistakes often get a lot of publicity.