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From Article published in Austin Business Journal by  Gary Hoover, Contributing Writer- Austin Business Journal

The recent publication of “The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators” — by Harvard Business School innovator Clayton Christensen and fellow authors Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen – reminded me of two key thinking habits that I have been talking about and teaching for years: observing and associating.

These habits — or skills, which you can get good through practice — are critical to the process of entrepreneurial thinking.  But they are not often taught in schools.

Start with observation, which the authors noted earlier cite as one of five key attributes of those who develop breakthrough ideas. Many people go through their lives with their ears shut and their eyes closed. Or they are so caught up in their iPods and smartphones that they pay no attention to the world or the people around them. And yet this is where many good ideas come from. I have about 220 ideas for new businesses in little pocket tablets I carry with me. Perhaps a third to a half of these ideas would not be there had I not listened in on conversations in restaurants.

Much of the information you need to know is right in front of you, waiting to be observed. If you go into any reasonably well-run grocery store — of which Austin has plenty — you should be able to spend 20 to 30 minutes and tell me the average age, income, family size and ethnicity of the people who shop there and live in the neighborhood. You can tell this from the merchandise on the shelf, regardless of whether customers are there.

In my course in entrepreneurial thinking, we always spend an evening at Barton Creek Square Mall observing things. How much revenue does each tenant in the food court do in 30 minutes? How many customers are in Macy’s, Nordstrom’s, J.C. Penney, Sears and Dillard’s at any given time? What types of cars are Penney’s customers driving? How are they different from Nordstrom’s customers? What types of shoes and watches are people wearing?

My students — ranging from 12 to 70, with a huge range of life experiences and educational backgrounds — almost always come away amazed at how much they learn from this exercise. Many tell me years later that this exercise and other elements of the course changed how they see everything.

Other friends and students have travelled with me through Mexico, Costa Rica, Russia and Thailand, seeing the world in this inquisitive way. They, too, say it changed everything for them. Opportunities and ideas flow more readily.

The other idea, perhaps even more critical to innovative thinking, is the power of association.

Most great ideas are merely the result of combining two things that everyone sees all the time but that no one had thought of together. This might sound simple, and it is. But it is oh-so-powerful.

For example, my first major start up was Bookstop, the first chain of book superstores. While the execution of the idea was difficult and complex, the core idea was not. We simply took the retail business model of Toys R Us –  giant single-category stores with large product selections and low prices — and applied it to books.  Charles Lazarus of Toys R Us had a whole new idea; the rest of us, from Bookstop to Staples to Home Depot, just applied his idea to new categories of merchandise.

I find the associating skill a little harder to teach, or at least to demonstrate, than observation.

 Here are some tips:

•  Be relaxed. Be ready for ideas to hit you, but don’t strain. Thinking too hard rarely gets you anywhere

•  Give things time to percolate. Marinate in everything you see and hear, collecting input from every source, including observation, conversation and even reading books and articles. Let new ideas sink in. Play with them in your head. Draw diagrams, fill whiteboards or tablets, or whatever works for you.

•  Start making lists of cool things you see, such as business innovations you read about inFortune and The Economist, new ads you see on TV or online, or products and services your friends tell you about. Take lessons from the great entrepreneurs of the past. Then gradually begin to combine those lists. Is there anything about Las Vegas and about the iPad that might make for an interesting intersection? Or UPS’s world-class service and your bank’s world-bottom service? Don’t dismiss any possible intersection at first; give it a chance to blossom. Take at least a few minutes thinking hard about what opportunities might come from the intersection.

•  Those leaders and thinkers who are truly open to new ideas, who take into account inputs from a multitude of sources — including observation — and then work to combine all that information in creative new ways are much more likely to come up with something that will benefit society, or at least better serve their own customers or constituencies.

Gary Hoover, founder of  Bookstop and Hoovers Inc. and a former entrepreneur in residence at the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Texas is also author of “The Art of Enterprise.”