Soumitra Dutta on rekindling the spark of innovation

In almost every conversation about innovation, someone resorts to some old words: vision, disruption, etc. Soumitra Dutta, former dean of Oxford Said Business School, reaches for something altogether different: a four-year-old child.

Soumitra Dutta, Oxford Dean, who recently cofounded AI startups NexiVerify and Caasaa, got the idea from Hal Gregersen, MIT senior lecturer and co-author of the book Innovator’s DNA, but he has clearly made it his own. Four-year-olds, he says, are constantly watching the people and the world around them, constantly asking questions, unafraid to try things even if they fail or break, because they instinctively know they can depend on others should anything go wrong.

According to AI scholar and author Soumitra Dutta, this is a near-exact list of the traits that researchers have associated with innovative leaders. "We have that innovation spirit built into us... by human DNA." The founding dean of Cornell University’s SC Johnson College of Business adds, “As we go through school, secondary school, university, and the work environment... the spark of innovation goes down. The spark of questioning goes down."

It's an approach he's tried to maintain as an adult ("I am a curious person by nature and I like getting my hands dirty", Dutta says in a recent article on Yahoo) and, arguably, the adult, professionalized version of the same four-year-old behavior described above is to get in there, touch something, then ask questions about it and touch it again, and don't stop if it starts to break.

The real job of an educational or professional environment is creating an environment to recover something that was already there. The role of a place like a business school isn't necessarily to hand people information; it's to build a safe space away from daily routine where people can reflect and, as he puts it, "rekindle that four-year-old spirit that you were born with".

Most prescriptions for how to be more creative assume that we have to get something․ Soumitra Dutta's version, as you just learnt, stresses almost the opposite: that the instincts were always there‚ but buried under years of being told to stop asking questions without obvious payoffs.