Innovation starts with the right mindset

My back of the envelope observation is that about 1% of doctors, engineers and scientists have an entrepreneurial mindset ?and the 6 habits that define it.

1. Personal growth relates to the size of the challenge, not the size of the kingdom. What motivates real innovators is the more exciting challenge, not the number of people reporting to them. The “size of the difference” they will make is more inspiring than the “size of the business.” They relish getting out of their comfort zone, and into the unknown.

2. The new direction is the challenge, not the destination.?The challenge is the transformation vehicle for true innovators, and not a performance goal. They focus on legacy creation, not legacy protection. They ignore failures and are constantly looking at the progress made. They treat innovations reviews like performance reviews.

3. Be an attacker of forces holding people back, not a defender.?Real innovators start by questioning the world order rather than conforming to it. They begin by confronting the forces holding everyone back, rather than living with it. The forces include mindset gravity, organization gravity, industry gravity, country gravity, and cultural gravity. You need to be able to turn no to yes. Here is an example of the attacker mentality.

4. New insights come from a quest for questions, not a quest for answers.?This discovery mindset searching for new questions drives real innovators away from more of the same. They fundamentally become value seekers; they look for value in every experience, in every conversation. They don’t seek prescriptions, they seek possibilities.

5. Stakeholders must be connected into the new reality, not convinced.?True innovators tip stakeholders into adopting and even co-owning the orbit-shifting idea. They go about tipping the heart first, assuming the mind will follow. They seek smart people, who openly express their doubts, and then collaborate to overcome them.

6. Work from the challenge backward, rather than capability forward.?Overcoming execution obstacles is combating dilution, not compromising, for these innovators. Their mindset is not “if-then” but “how and how else?” They convert problems to opportunities, and often the original idea grows far bigger than the starting promise

If innovation starts with mindset, then your belief systems create your mindset.

Motivated reasoning (motivational reasoning bias) is a cognitive and social response in which individuals, consciously or sub-consciously, allow emotion-loaded motivational biases to affect how new information is perceived. Individuals tend to favor evidence that coincides with their current beliefs and reject new information that contradicts them, despite contrary evidence.

Motivated reasoning overlaps with confirmation bias . Both favor evidence supporting one's beliefs, at the same time dismissing contradictory evidence. However, confirmation bias is mainly a sub-conscious (innate) cognitive bias. In contrast, motivated reasoning (motivational bias) is a sub-conscious or conscious process by which one's emotions control the evidence supported or dismissed. For confirmation bias, the evidence or arguments can be logical as well as emotional.

Motivated reasoning can be classified into two categories: 1) Accuracy-oriented (non-directional), in which the motive is to arrive at an accurate conclusion, irrespective of the individual's beliefs, and 2) Goal-oriented (directional), in which the motive is to arrive at a particular conclusion.

Lifelong learning is also a part of the equation.

Research shows:

• Explorers have a long-term commitment to achieving impact in a specific domain that excites them?—?anything from factory work or financial services to gardening or big wave surfing.
• They are excited in the face of unexpected challenges. Explorers view these hurdles as an opportunity to learn and achieve even greater impact. In fact, if they’re not confronted with enough challenges, they get bored and seek environments that will give them more.
• When confronted with new challenges, explorers have an immediate desire to seek out and connect with others who can help them get to better answers faster so that they can increase their impact.

One expert is worried about Gen Z. He concedes that his judgment of Gen Z may be premature: “It could be that you’ll see some impact in three or four years, by the time they’re 30. But I’m predicting that they will be less effective, less impactful, than previous generations.” Why? “You should always keep your eye on whether people are in ‘discover mode’ or ‘defend mode.’” In the former mode, you seize opportunities to be creative. In the latter, “you’re not creative, you’re not future-thinking, you’re focused on threats in the present.”

Mindsets are mental lenses that dictate what information leaders and entrepreneurs take in and use to make sense of and navigate the situations they encounter. Simply, four distinct sets of mindsets drive what leaders do and why.

Your mindset is what you believe to be the larger meaning or purpose behind the work you do every day . A growth mindset is about believing that developing and making progress is the?point?of what you’re doing. As I’ve said?before , it’s about?getting better?as opposed to just?being good. And it’s about engaging in specific growth mindset strategies and habits to help keep you focused on the potential for growth in everything you do.

Take this test to see if you have a Health Transformer Mindset.

An idea is not an invention or an innovation. An idea is a thought that never sees the light of day. An invention is an idea reduced to practice. An innovation is something new or something old done in a new way that adds a substantial user defined multiple of value when compared to existing offerings of the status quo.

Here are quotes that will give you a better idea about the differences.

What is a "mindset"? Experts vary, but, fundamentally, it is how and why we think about things the way we do and how we interpret the world. We use mental models, that, unlike most personality traits, are malleable, not fixed,?and that drive our emotions and behavior.?As one columnist noted. "There’s a more precise way to put this. An event is really two things. It’s the event itself and then it’s the process by which we make meaning of the event. As Aldous Huxley put it, “Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you." You can call it the epistemology of the environment and most has to do not with the stimulus, but your response to it.

Mental models are created by the internal conversations we have with ourselves and, those conversations, psychologists claim, create feelings that drive behavior. Negative thoughts drive negative behavior and vice versa. In other works, you will become what you think.

Researchers have found that people vary in these mindsets and, importantly, that they can be changed. Some people lean more toward the view that interests are inherent in a person, simply waiting to be awakened or found — this is what we call a?fixed mindset of interest. Others lean more toward the view that interests can be developed and that, with commitment and investment, they can grow over time — we call this a?growth mindset of interest. For a classic example, read the latest biography about Leonardo Da Vinci.

They reasoned that these mindsets might affect how open people are to new or different interests, whether they be in arts, science, business, athletics, or other areas. If interests are viewed as inherent and fixed — and an interest has already been found — then exploring elsewhere might not seem fruitful. But if interests can be developed, then having strong interests in one area would not preclude the development of interest in other areas.

Stanford Educational Psychologist Carol Dweck defines mindset as “implicit theories.” That is to say that it is the collection of assumptions and beliefs we use to represent how the world works. These theories are implicit because they are unexamined and frequently subconscious.

The biomedical entrepreneurial mindset describes a state of mind or mental model that is characterized by the pursuit of opportunity with scarce resources. The goal is to create stakeholder/customer/user-defined value through the deployment of biomedical or clinical innovation using a viable business model. When you examine the 5 components of the definition, it might give you some insight about the 1% question.

The pursuit of opportunity: Doctors see the opportunity to make patients better. Ideas become inventions and innovations when technopreneurs and market perceivers collide. There needs to be the right combination of problem seekers and problem solvers.

Using scarce resources:?Doctors have all the resources they need at the click of a mouse. If anything, they have too many resources, which leads to waste and inappropriate treatments and tests.

Create user value:?While consumerization of healthcare is gradually changing the calculus, doctors, for the most part, still call the shots. Patients are left with “my way or the highway.”

Deploying innovation:?Most doctors don't understand the difference between an idea, an invention, or an innovation or the difference between tinkering, a solution looking for a problem, incrementalism, or truly disruptive change. They think it's a big deal when they tweak a model to get improvement instead of making the model obsolete.

?VAST business model : The model needs to be evidence based, not faith based, and time is of the essence. The meter is running.

So, do you have an entrepreneurial mindset? Take this test .

Rewiring your brain to see the world differently takes internal motivation, tools, triggers, coaching, rewards and practice. Here are 10 ways to get you started:

1. Connect ?Expand your internal and external networks

2. Experiment. Try things that don't cost much and measure what you learned

3. Observe. Innovators watch what everyone else watches, but they see different things. The author of?Sensemaking?explores what it really means to pay attention.

The premise of this book is that contemporary people have lost the capacity for mindful observation of the world around them. As an entrepreneur, corporate consultant, and instructor at the New School, Madsbjerg teaches people how to take note of phenomena that we often fail to recognize as important—if we even see them at all. Using Wittgenstein as his guide, the author argues that it’s only through paying attention to what happens in the background that we fully understand what’s happening in the foreground.

4. Question. Why not? Suppose we did it differently? What if?

5. Associate. As Jobs said, innovation is about connecting dots. Most of us just see dots. Innovators see patterns and opportunities.

6. Practice entrepreneurial habits.

7. Get inside?Understand and adapt to how your attachment style determines your work style

8. Learn the basic science first. Organizational entrepreneurial mindsets are a lot like personal ones.?

9. Acceptance.?Most people do not have an entrepreneurial mindset. The percentage of adults involved in startups in 2012 hit 13% –a?record high since Babson began tracking entrepreneurship rates in 1999. Unfortunately, of those that do, most will fail. When you realize you don't have what it takes, cut your losses early and put yourself and a whole bunch of other people out of their misery and find something else to do.?

10. Hang around the right people?Find a mentor. Purge the doubting Thomases and negative Nancies from your Facebook page, since their half-empty mindsets are contagious. Network relentlessly.

Having the right mindset leads you to developing entrepreneurial competencies , which in turn, fortify your mindset to work on competency gaps.

However, for intrapreneurs to thrive, there needs to be not just an intrapreneurial innovation mindset, but an organizational mindset as well. In other words, you must have a mindset match.

Here is how to embrace change using emotional intelligence.

Here's how to cultivate an organizational innovation mindset

Every decision is a bet that is clouded by uncertainty, luck, and your mindset.

Changing your mindset is hard. For many, it will be impossible, given their backgrounds and how they have come to see things. For a handful, though, their efforts could change the world.?

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. Margaret Mead

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack