How do you spot innovation opportunities?

Leaders often state that they want to have innovative organizations, yet they can neglect to do the one thing that would help ensure innovation. That is, they must empower their employees to be curious. If you research successful people like Warren Buffett and Oprah Winfrey, you will find quotes praising the value of curiosity. Opportunities for innovation come from asking about why things are done (or not done) in a certain way. To discover opportunities, we must question things. The problem is that many leaders believe they encourage curiosity, where re-search from Francesca Gino at Harvard shows that employees do not feel they are as encouraged to be curious as their leaders believe

To drive new ideas, leaders must model the curiosity culture they seek. That means letting down their guard a bit and showing their employees that they do not know everything. Leaders must be willing to ask questions that they normally believed might make them look bad. Their perception that they must know everything will filter down to their employees, who will hold back questions to show they know everything as well. That will inhibit the questions needed to be asked to get out of status-quo behaviors. To inspire their followers, leaders must not only allow input but reward it.
Internal events like hackathons can be helpful. They are more of an event-based solution rather than a day-in and day-out expectation. They can be great to get the ball rolling; however, it is critical to make curiosity a core value. They must take what they learn from events like a hackathon and run with them. They can also learn from what others have done to inspire curiosity [...]