Dr. Anne Marie Knott is the author of "HOW INNOVATION REALLY WORKS: Using The Trillion-Dollar R&D Fix To Drive Growth." She is a Professor of Strategy at the Olin Business School at Washington University, and prior to her position at Olin, Dr. Knott served as Assistant Professor of Management at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Her primary research area is innovation – both large-scale R&D and entrepreneurship, which stems from her previous career at Hughes Aircraft Company developing missile guidance systems. Her research has received two grants from the National Science Foundation and has been covered by CNBC, Forbes, BusinessWeek, and the Wall Street Journal. She has published numerous articles in Harvard Business Review and many other publications.

What you'll learn about in this episode

• Anne Marie's background and her innovation research
• Anne Marie's work on missile guidance systems
• How the "Mary Poppins philosophy" helps Anne Marie be productive
• Why making work fun is the key to accomplishing things
• How to chunk your day to improve your productivity and creativity
• Why many successful people lose sight of their accomplishments
• Why it's important to have good intuition about what will drive a company's growth
• How Anne Marie developed a way to measure R&D
• Why new ideas are critical
• How everyday activities are different from strategies
• Why it's important to keep sight of your strategy
• Why business owners should revisit their larger plans on a regular basis
• How Anne Marie was motivated by being held to high standards
• What a mentor truly is
• Why many current lessons about innovation are wrong
• The biggest reason R&D productivity has declined
• What a business research quotient (RQ) is and how to measure it
• Why open innovation is often a mistake

How to best connect with Anne Marie:

• Book: "How Innovation Really Works: Using the Trillion-Dollar R&D Fix to Drive Growth"
• Email: [email protected]