Platform: Zoom
Jeff Dyer, co-author of "Innovation Capital: How to Compete and Win Like The World's Most Innovative Leaders" how to convince investors, customers and colleagues why they should back and buy your new idea.
Successful leaders excel at winning resources and support for their ideas. According to Jeff Dyer, professor at Wharton and Brigham Young University, this quality is so valuable – and measurably more important for innovation than just being creative – that it now has a name: “innovation capital.” Effective leaders of innovation like Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are successful not only because of the quality of their ideas, but because they have the reputation and networks to successfully commercialize creative concepts. Dyer, one of the world’s leading strategy scholars, has dedicated his career to discovering the formula for achieving organizational and personal success. Now, he’s helping leaders reach the next level.
For more than two decades, Dyer has spoken about and studied strategic growth and innovation in a variety of industries across the world. His latest research asks a compelling question: how does an innovator transform a creative vision into a reality? In Dyer’s book co-authored with Nathan Furr and Curtis Lefrandt, “Innovation Capital: How to Compete – and Win – Like the World’s Most Innovative Leaders” (Harvard Business Review Press, June 2019), he interviews today’s most innovative CEOs to identify how they reached their heights of success and influence.
Dyer argues that creative skills, the “human capital” explored in his earlier works, are essential, but not enough. He reveals the other types of capital needed to launch innovations with impact: “innovative social capital” (who you know) and “innovative reputation capital” (what you’ve done that brings credibility). Together, these three kinds of capital total the skills and qualities that allow visionaries like Bezos and industry disruptors like Netflix’s Reed Hastings to marshal the resources necessary to pursue even the most futuristic ideas. Through the proper accumulation of innovation capital, says Dyer, you can become a powerful influencer while building a personal brand that inspires enthusiasm, confidence and trust.
Professor Dyer is the lead author of the best-selling business book “The Innovator’s DNA” (HBR Press, 2011) with Clay Christensen and Hal Gregersen, and co-author of “The Innovator’s Method” (HBR Press, 2014) with Furr. Together, these works – and Dyer’s keynotes, interactive workshops and advisory work – lay the foundation for leaders across disciplines to not only improve their innovation capabilities, but to also help those whom they manage do the same. A former Bain & Company consultant and manager,
Dyer focuses with a laser-like intensity on how to measure innovation, foster it and make it repeatable. He is a regular contributor to Forbes magazine, and annually, he and his co-authors publish their list of the year’s most innovative companies in partnership with Forbes. Dyer’s case studies on leading companies such as Amazon and Tesla serve to illustrate this point, as he meticulously dissects and analyzes the strategies that have made them among the world’s foremost and greatest innovators.
Professor Dyer, who earned his doctorate from UCLA, is a highly celebrated speaker, professor and author. His research has been covered in articles at Forbes, The Economist, Fortune, BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fast Company and many other publications. Beyond his work on innovation, Dyer is the only strategy scholar in the world to have published five times in the Harvard Business Review and five times in Strategic Management Journal, the top academic journal in the strategy field.