You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebeck on Bloomberg Radio. All right, so what happens when you tap into advances in neuro and cognitive sciences. Our next guest writes about it, saying, that's how we get to our best innovative ideas. Colombie Business School Professor of Business in the Management Department, Shena Yangar is out with a new book. It's called Think Bigger, How to Innovate. She is with us on zoom from Columbia Business School
uptown at one hundred and thirtieth Street. Full disclosure on the cover quote from Michael R. Bloomberg he is the founder of Bloomberg ALP and Blueberg Philanthropies, and that quote talking about she's impact. Shena, really nice to have you here on Bloomberg Business Week. Yeah, tell us about your book specifically and what you set out to share with the world with it. My book is meant to be a very practical book. Think of Think Bigger as a six step process that anybody can follow to come up
with their most creative ideas? Is it that easy? Can Maddie and I do it? Anybody can do it. I wouldn't say it's easy, okay. I mean, you know, it's kind of like learning a new skill. It's like learning Python or learning how to do collodes. When you go to the gym, you know, you do have to learn the steps, and you do have to practice practice, practice, and with each iteration you get better and better and
better at it. Well. I love you talk in the book about and obviously we think a lot about CEOs and entrepreneurs here at Bloomberg, and you talk about how when you became director of the Entrepreneurship Center at Columbia's Business School, you noticed that there was a lot on how to implement new ideas, but not a lot on how to come up with them in the first place.
I wonder, what is the You have a lot of amazing tools in the book about how to come up with those ideas, But what would you say, Let's say you're at a dinner party and you have, you know, an elevator pitch moment for someone who's looking for some inspiration. What is the biggest tool that you wish that entrepreneurs knew about to come up with good ideas. I have a problem. It's easy for me to figure out how people have already been solving this problem in my industry.
What other industry, either in the present or in the past, has had an analogous problem and what did they do that worked? That's what you're on the hunt for. Yeah, that's fascinating. It also just talks about this whole idea of like looking without your second it's a different kind
of networking, a different well. And it's interesting because I always think it's like, you know, you throw a bunch of people together from various backgrounds and you're going to get a better outcome, whether it's on an idea, a situation,
a topic, or maybe a discovery. So having said that, when you look at the innovative and disruptive space that has certainly been our world in the last decade, whether it's something like an uber or you know, I think about you know, Amazon or Netflix or what have you, I'm curious how you think about that and what you come up with in this book. Maybe who were some of the entrepreneurs who really applied these kinds of principles. Well, let's take Netflix, right, So Blockbuster was the leading I
guess competitor, although he you know, he killed them. And let's think about how read Hasting came up with that idea. He said, well, I want to watch movies at home in a much more convenient fashion. I hate these late fees and I hate moving my butt, even if it is just a block to go return the movie. And so what did he do? He learned from Jim memberships
a new way to charge people. And he learned from at that time a very new company called Amazon that you didn't have to have a shop on every block. You could actually do it as a mail order. And remember it started with DVDs. So notice how what read Hasting is doing is he's learning from totally unrelated industries like ship. That's so smart and such a good lesson
to us. You've also written a book called the Art of Choosing, and in this current book you talk about some of the challenges with deciding which problems to attack. So as you're talking about like the Netflix example, there are a lot of different problems that an entrepreneur can choose to tackle. What is your advice, Sheena on determining which one to start with. You really have to think carefully, what's that problem I want to solve, and you want to define it in a way that is solvable, and
if you were to solve it, you could scale. And I think Amazon is a brilliant example of that. You know that Bezos didn't just sit down and said, let me just start selling books. He actually contemplated multiple alternatives before he got to that. He thought about doing the sort of precursor of what ultimately became each trade, and he thought a bit of of other ideas which ultimately did become real ideas. But he started with books because at some level he understood, Hey, if I make it
work with books, I can scale from there. So I gotta say, you know, Shena, in teeing up for you to come join us, I've been teasing big time that it's about, you know, advances in neuro and cognitive sciences to ultimately get our biggest and best ideas and maybe most innovative. What specifically do you mean what are we tapping into when it comes to neuro and cognitive Well, from cognitive science, we know all the biases we can make, that's a long list, right, all the mistakes we can make.
From neuroscience, we know how learning and memory works. So imagine if I were to say, like if I ask you when do you get your best ideas? What were you doing? Probably you'd say you took a show, worry round a job, something like that in net, something right, something where your mind was just allowed to wander. We call that mind wandering, but you're waiting for it to
happen almost uncontrollably, organically, spontaneously. Imagine if I could tell you that actually we know enough about the way your mind works when it's wandering that I can actually show you how to do that the more deliberatively, and by doing it more deliberatively, you can actually generate more ideas and higher quality ideas. It's definitely that's essentially what I'm showing people how to do. It's really on a whole other plane. Like you really kind of have to think.
It's really fascinating. We've run out of time, but I mean, i'd like to you know, among your thinking is you know how non experts and outsiders, as you said, can learn just about enough about a field to create an innovation for it. As you said, even Maddie and I could probably figure this out, you know, in terms of using your steps, and you're thinking and relevant as we think increasingly about how to continue to innovate and disrupt in our world at large. Shena, thank you for finding
some time for a Shena A. Yanger. She's a professor of business in the Management Department at the Columbia Business School, joining us via Zoom from the Business School in Uptown, New York City. Her new book, Think Bigger, How to Innovate It is out and you can check it out. Yeah right, You've just got to kind of open up your mind on Yeah. And I mean, Carol, you were telling me earlier you came up with an idea. I
think in one of those like wandering mind things. I come up with all of my ideas when I'm like on a walk or whatever. So it's it's real. I know it's gonna keep a yellow sticky in a pen nearby. Yeah, exactly, exactly. All right, everybody, you're listening and watching Bloomberg Business Week