#144—Gina O'Connor: Building Your Company's Innovation Competencies

Gina O’Connor is a professor at Babson College, where she teaches on the topics of Corporate Entrepreneurship and Breakthrough Innovation in large mature companies. Previously, she had a long career at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  Gina has co-authored three award-winning books on Breakthrough Innovation and published numerous papers in leading journals including Sloan Management Review, Harvard Business Review, RTM and Journal of Product Innovation Management, among others.  Her mission is to help large established companies learn how to renew themselves through organic growth via game-changing, strategic innovation. She is a firm believer that to be successful, organizations must develop an innovation function, complete with its own people, processes, metrics and culture that operates within the company to translate emerging science, technology and business models into  new platforms of growth that will fuel the company’s future health in spite of itself. In this discussion, we fashion our conversation by following her fascinating journey through three distinct phases of studies over years of research—the foundation of her books—that evolved as her research revealed new findings. Our conversation covers more than we can summarize in this short introduction, but among these insights we discuss: What her team’s research discovered are the constraints to innovation—and they’re more often beyond just technical, contrary to what many think The three distinct competencies of innovation—discovery, incubation, and scaling—that businesses must develop, each with different people, processes, and metrics The concept of “domains of innovation intent,”—untapped new markets in which a company can explore and potentially unlock a wide portfolio of opportunities The key learnings leaders should take away from her team’s extensive studies to tackle an often-overlooked component of innovation: talent management Episode Timeline:00:00—Highlight from today's episode01:14—Introducing Gina + the topic of today’s episode03:36—A quick summation of Gina's three books—and the research phases within each one10:59—The second phase of research and book: capabilities18:10—A case study that led to discovering "domains of innovation intent"20:26—The third phase of research and book: talent management24:07—Flipping failures into a portfolio of opportunities27:10—Ecosystems as a byproduct of innovation32:27—How are the concepts of an agile workforce and upskilling interrelated?36:25—What does a leader need to think about to successfully lead these changes?40:15—How can people continue learning from you?______________________________________________________________Additional Resources:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gina-o-connor-047b862/Link to booksThank you to our executive producer Zach Ness, our producer Nazanin Homayoun Jam and our editor James Pearce. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, download, and subscribe. I’m your host, Kaihan Krippendorff—thank you for listening.Follow us at outthinker.com/podcast