Why You Need Innovation Capital — And How to Get It

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2019

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Nathan Furr, assistant professor of strategy at INSEAD, researches what makes great innovative leaders, and he reveals how they develop and spend “innovation capital.” Like social or political capital, it’s a power to motivate employees, win the buy-in of stakeholders, and sell breakthrough products. Furr argues that innovation capital is something everyone can develop and grow by using something he calls impression amplifiers. Furr is the coauthor of the book “Innovation Capital: How to Compete--and Win--Like the World's Most Innovative Leaders.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	Looking for a good book? Pick up your next business read during HBR Cyber Monday sale.
0:06.0	Head to store.HBR.org and use promo code cyber23 to save big on HBR books, tools, curated collections and more. That's store.
0:16.7	HBR.org. Happy shopping. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish. Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison were both great inventors of their time.
0:50.0	Tesla was brilliant. He even felt sorry for how long it took Edison to come up with his inventions,
0:56.4	but Tesla was eventually forced out of his company and he died penniless.
1:01.4	Edison, on the other hand hand racked up commercial success. He managed
1:06.1	to motivate employees, woo investors, and win consumers. His inventions broke through to
1:11.5	the mass market. Today's guest says the main reason
1:15.2	that Edison succeeded where Tesla failed was because of Edison's innovation
1:19.9	capital. That's the idea that similar to social capital or political capital,
1:25.1	great innovative leaders develop the power to convince people to join their
1:29.3	cause and bring unproven products and ideas to reality.
1:34.0	Our guest is Nathan Furr.
1:35.6	He's a strategy professor at Inciad
1:38.1	and along with his fellow researchers he studied innovative firms
1:41.5	and interviewed their leaders. He's the co-author of the book Innovation Capital, how to compete and win like the world's most innovative leaders.
1:50.0	Nathan, thanks for being here.
1:52.0	Thank you for having me.
1:55.0	Now, I have to say that with all that's been written
1:58.0	in the business press about innovative leaders,
2:01.0	like, and the cult of the startup.
2:03.3	It seems like one thing that has to be really well understood is how people like Steve jobs and
	...

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