WAY 7Filter the Noise: Adopting Drucker's eight sources for innovation can power your discovery engine.

About the Way

How can moonshot teams and organizations build an internal capability to purposefully scan and integrate ongoing changes around them into their plans? It is easy to be deluged by bestseller books promising best practices, burning advice from management gurus and other experts touting transformative insights, and the latest reports from <insert any management consultancy or bank> listing the newest trends now upending your industry. Light mockery aside, each and every one of these sources can become a valuable resource inside your group, if you have a model of how to use the proffered insights.

Often called the father of modern management, Peter Drucker is a renowned long‐range strategist whose model of innovation sources has withstood the test of time. His model draws from earlier work that laid the foundation of his pattern language. In the 1950s, he described the growing need to turn business activities from ad hoc to more systematic processes, further ensuring that employees are trained and supported in these skills—familiar issues over a half century later to leaders today.1 Drucker also challenged the field of management science to consider the importance of long‐range planning.2

He expanded on these themes in his seminal article “The discipline of innovation,” reminding managers that “innovation can be systematically managed if one knows where and how ...

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