RE:Think Innovation


Book Description

Discover the five simple steps to corporate innovation in a practical guide that makes coming up with great ideas everybody’s business. Experts and executives often portray innovation as confusing and complicated. Some even suggest that you need a special degree to know how to do it right. But the truth is, consistently coming up with great ideas isn’t a unique talent or even a difficult skill. It’s actually a simple five-step framework that anyone can follow to look at the work that they do differently, and have a bigger impact on the people they serve. RE:Think Innovation shows readers how to tie individual competence with innovation techniques to direct corporate outcomes. In engaging and accessible language, Carla Johnson demonstrates how to create a unified, idea-driven employee base that delivers more ideas in a shorter amount of time. Ultimately, this is the path that makes organizations nimble, passionate, innovative powerhouses that deliver extraordinary outcomes for sustained periods of time.




Open Services Innovation


Book Description

The father of "open innovation" is back with his most significant book yet. Henry Chesbrough’s acclaimed book Open Innovation described a new paradigm for management in the 21st century. Open Services Innovation offers a new approach that demonstrates how open innovation combined with a services approach to business is an effective and powerful way to grow and compete in our increasingly services-driven economy. Chesbrough shows how companies in any industry can make the critical shift from product- to service-centric thinking, from closed to open innovation where co-creating with customers enables sustainable business models that drive continuous value creation for customers. He maps out a strategic approach and proven framework that any individual, business unit, company, or industry can put to work for renewed growth and profits. The book includes guidance and compelling examples for small and large companies, services businesses, and emerging economies, as well as a path forward for the innovation industry. "Whether you are managing a product or a service, your business needs to become more open and more inclusive in order to be more innovative. Open Services Innovation will be an invaluable guide to intrepid managers who commit to making that journey." —GARY HAMEL, visiting professor, London Business School; director, Management Lab; and author, The Future of Management "I tore out page after page to share with my leaders. Chesbrough has pioneered an entire rethink of business innovation that’s rich in concept, deeply explained, with tools ready to use in every industry." —SCOTT COOK, founder and chairman of the executive committee, Intuit "Focusing on core competence often tempts managers to keep continuing what succeeded in the past. A far more important question is what capabilities are critical in the future, and Chesbrough shows how to ask and answer these issues." —CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN, Robert & Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, and author, The Innovator's Dilemma "To thrive, businesses will need to master the lessons of open service innovation. Here is their one-stop guidebook with important lessons clearly and compellingly presented." —JAMES C. SPOHRER, director, IBM University Programs World-Wide "Open Innovation pioneer Henry Chesbrough breaks new ground with Open Services Innovation, a persuasive argument for the power of co-creation in the world of services." —TOM KELLEY, general manager, IDEO, and author, The Ten Faces of Innovation, The Art of Innovation "With his trademark style of beautifully explained examples, Henry Chesbrough shows how open service innovation and new business models can help you escape this product commodity trap and bring you to the next level of competition." —ALEX OSTERWALDER, author, Business Model Generation "Open Services Innovation shows how a business can redefine itself as a service organisation and tap into faster growth through shared innovation." —SIR TERRY LEAHY, chief executive, Tesco "Chesbrough shows how innovating openly with a services mindset can make you a market leader." —CHARLENE LI, author, Open Leadership, and founder, Altimeter Group




Rethinking Creativity


Book Description

Discover how creativity depends on inside-the-box thinking-that's right, not outside the box-and a new perspective on creative thinking.




Simulating Innovation


Book Description

Christopher Watts and Nigel Gilbert explore the generation, diffusion and impact of innovations, which can now be studied using computer simulations. ø Agent-based simulation models can be used to explain the innovation that emerges from interact




Rethink


Book Description

An “engaging and enlightening” (The Wall Street Journal) argument that innovation and progress are often achieved by revisiting and retooling ideas from the past rather than starting from scratch—from Guardian columnist and contributor to The Atlantic, Stephen Poole. Innovation is not always as innovative as it may seem. Rethink is the story of how old ideas that were mocked or ignored for centuries are now storming back to the cutting edge of science and technology, informing the way we lead our lives. This is the story of Lamarck and the modern-day epigeneticist whose research vindicated his mocked two hundred-year-old theory of evolution; of the return of cavalry use in the war in Afghanistan; of Tesla’s bringing back the electric car; and of the cognitive scientists who made breakthroughs by turning to ancient Greek philosophy. “An anecdote-rich tour through the centuries” (The New York Times), with examples from business to philosophy to science, Rethink shows what we can learn by revisiting old, discarded ideas and considering them from a novel perspective. From within all these rich anecdotes of overlooked ideas come good ones, helping us find new ways to think about ideas in our own time—including out-of-the-box proposals in the boardroom to grand projects for social and political change. “Clever and entertaining...a thoughtful and thought-provoking book” (The Sunday Times, London), Rethink helps you see the world differently. Armed with this picture of the surprising evolution of ideas and their triumphant second lives, and in the bestselling tradition of Malcolm Gladwell, Poole’s new approach to a familiar topic is fun, convincing, and brilliant—and offers a clear takeaway: if you want to affect the future, start by taking a look at the past.




Markets in the Making


Book Description

Slicing through blunt theories of supply and demand, Callon presents a rigorously researched but counterintuitive model of how everyday market activity gets produced. If you’re convinced you know what a market is, think again. In his long-awaited study, French sociologist and engineer Michel Callon takes us to the heart of markets, to the unsung processes that allow innovations to become robust products and services. Markets in the Making begins with the observation that stable commercial transactions are more enigmatic, more elusive, and more involved than previously described by economic theory. Slicing through blunt theories of supply and demand, Callon presents a rigorously researched but counterintuitive model of market activity that emphasizes what people designing products or launching startups soon discover—the inherent difficulties of connecting individuals to things. Callon’s model is founded upon the notion of “singularization,” the premise that goods and services must adapt and be adapted to the local milieu of every individual whose life they enter. Person by person, thing by thing, Callon demonstrates that for ordinary economic transactions to emerge en masse, singular connections must be made. Pushing us to see markets as more than abstract interfaces where pools of anonymous buyers and sellers meet, Callon draws our attention to the exhaustively creative practices that market professionals continuously devise to entangle people and things. Markets in the Making exemplifies how prototypes, fragile curiosities that have only just been imagined, are gradually honed into predictable objects and practices. Once these are active enough to create a desired effect, yet passive enough to be transferred from one place to another without disruption, they will have successfully achieved the status of “goods” or “services.” The output of this more ample process of innovation, as redefined by Callon, is what we recognize as “the market”—commercial activity, at scale. The capstone of an influential research career at the forefront of science and technology studies, Markets in the Making coherently integrates the empirical perspective of product engineering with the values of the social sciences. After masterfully redescribing how markets are made, Callon culminates with a strong empirical argument for why markets can and should be harnessed to enact social change. His is a theory of markets that serves social critique.




The Changing Frontier


Book Description

In 1945, Vannevar Bush, founder of Raytheon and one-time engineering dean at MIT, delivered a report to the president of the United States that argued for the importance of public support for science, and the importance of science for the future of the nation. The report, Science: The Endless Frontier, set America on a path toward strong and well-funded institutions of science, creating an intellectual architecture that still defines scientific endeavor today. In The Changing Frontier, Adam B. Jaffe and Benjamin Jones bring together a group of prominent scholars to consider the changes in science and innovation in the ensuing decades. The contributors take on such topics as changes in the organization of scientific research, the geography of innovation, modes of entrepreneurship, and the structure of research institutions and linkages between science and innovation. An important analysis of where science stands today, The Changing Frontier will be invaluable to practitioners and policy makers alike.




From Incremental to Exponential


Book Description

“This timely book reminds us that innovation is agnostic about where it's created.” —Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft Over and over, we see big legacy businesses getting beaten to the punch by energetic little start-ups. It seems like innovation can come from only the bottom up or from the outside in. But tech experts Vivek Wadwha and Ismail Amla are here to tell you that “big equals slow and stodgy” is a myth. Based on decades of experience working with both the world's leading brands and disruptive start-ups, this book explores the opportunity legacy companies have to create new markets, supercharge growth, and remake their businesses by combining the mindset and tool belt of start-ups with the benefits of incumbency: boatloads of customer data, decades of brand equity, robust distribution channels, enormous financial assets, and more. Wadhwa and Amla go deeply into why the pace and dynamics of innovation have changed so dramatically in recent years and show how companies can overcome obstacles like the Eight Deadly Sins of Stasis. Equally important, they provide a playbook on how to use their insights in your own company, team, or career. This fast-paced, anecdote-rich story rethinks modern innovation—a book every manager, executive, and ambitious employee will want to read.




Innovation in Real Places


Book Description

Winner of Balsillie Prize for Public Policy Winner of Donner Prize A challenge to prevailing ideas about innovation and a guide to identifying the best growth strategy for your community. Across the world, cities and regions have wasted trillions of dollars on blindly copying the Silicon Valley model of growth creation. Since the early years of the information age, we've been told that economic growth derives from harnessing technological innovation. To do this, places must create good education systems, partner with local research universities, and attract innovative hi-tech firms. We have lived with this system for decades, and the result is clear: a small number of regions and cities at the top of the high-tech industry but many more fighting a losing battle to retain economic dynamism. But are there other models that don't rely on a flourishing high-tech industry? In Innovation in Real Places, Dan Breznitz argues that there are. The purveyors of the dominant ideas on innovation have a feeble understanding of the big picture on global production and innovation. They conflate innovation with invention and suffer from techno-fetishism. In their devotion to start-ups, they refuse to admit that the real obstacle to growth for most cities is the overwhelming power of the real hubs, which siphon up vast amounts of talent and money. Communities waste time, money, and energy pursuing this road to nowhere. Breznitz proposes that communities instead focus on where they fit in the four stages in the global production process. Some are at the highest end, and that is where the Clevelands, Sheffields, and Baltimores are being pushed toward. But that is bad advice. Success lies in understanding the changed structure of the global system of production and then using those insights to enable communities to recognize their own advantages, which in turn allows to them to foster surprising forms of specialized innovation. As he stresses, all localities have certain advantages relative to at least one stage of the global production process, and the trick is in recognizing it. Leaders might think the answer lies in high-tech or high-end manufacturing, but more often than not, they're wrong. Innovation in Real Places is an essential corrective to a mythology of innovation and growth that too many places have bought into in recent years. Best of all, it has the potential to prod local leaders into pursuing realistic and regionally appropriate models for growth and innovation.




Innovation


Book Description

Any organisation looking to succeed in the global digital economy of today - and tomorrow - must innovate. Innovation introduces the global pioneers whose ideas and products have driven the changes that have revolutionised our world in every field. It showcases the pioneers who have broken the mould and led the pack in every field from business and technology to food, fashion, culture and healthcare. Drawing on exclusive interviews with more than 100 leading innovators from around the world, Innovation highlights the common denominators linking these highly creative people. It presents the inside track on who's done what, how they did it, what drives them on, and why innovation is so critical to individuals, businesses and to society as a whole. This book is a fascinating, fast-paced read and more importantly, it will empower you and your business to be more innovative too. Online supporting resources for this book include a bonus chapter on the key to innovation.