Using Thematic Thinking to Achieve Business Success, Growth, and Innovation


Book Description

Leverage hidden similarities and connections to succeed in new markets and avert emerging business risks! Firmly rooted in the latest cognitive science, Thematic Thinking helps you recognize your great opportunities and grave threats in distant but related industries and markets. If you're an executive, entrepreneur, or strategist, it will help you illuminate blind spots on your strategic maps and innovation processes, by radically redefining what you see as similar to your core business. Using Thematic Thinking to Achieve Business Success, Growth, and Innovation explains why this approach to innovation works so well, and how to successfully apply it in your business. Using realistic business cases, the authors show: How Thematic Thinking responds to today's radically shifting business environment, and the collapse of traditional market boundaries Why traditional approaches to innovation can often be counterproductive, and how to go beyond them How to systematically uncover deep similarities where most managers only see differences How to understand these similarities as immense new business opportunities – and uncover emerging risks you wouldn't otherwise notice until too late How to explore and combine themes, identify similarities, create and evaluate thematic ideas, organize for Thematic Thinking, and overcome obstacles to success Which Google manager would have imagined people substituting Facebook for Gmail? Which Nike manager recognizes the huge potential competitive threat now presented by Apple? With Thematic Thinking, linkages like this become clear – and innovative, once-hidden strategic options are revealed!




Using Paired Constraints to Solve The Innovation Problem


Book Description

This book defines innovation as both a problem and a problem-solving process. It allows readers to approach innovation as a straight-forward problem solving process, and teaches them the paired constraint process to solve specific innovation problems. The authors have used their experience working in creative industries, combined with their academic perspective to create a formal, teachable tool for solving innovation problems. This consists of a formal structure (the problem space), a functional strategy(the paired constraints) and process. (solution by substitution). This book provides a practice section, allowing anyone interested in solving the problem of innovation to learn and develop their skills.




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




Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results


Book Description

A transformative system that shows leaders how to rethink their strategies, retool their capabilities, and revitalize their businesses for stronger, longer-lasting success.There’s a learning curve to running any successful business. But when leaders begin to rely on past achievements or get stuck in old thinking and practices that no longer work, they need to take a step back—and unlearn. This innovative and actionable framework from executive coach Barry O’Reilly shows leaders how to break the cycle and move away from once-useful mindsets and behaviors that were effective in the past but are no longer relevant in the current business climate and may now stand in the way of success.With this simple but powerful three-step system, leaders can: 1. Unlearn the behaviors and mindsets that keep them and their businesses from moving forward. 2. Relearn the skills, strategies, and innovations that are transforming the world every day. 3. Break through old habits and thinking by opening up to new ideas, perspectives, and resources. Good leaders know they need to continuously learn. But great leaders know when to unlearn the past to succeed in the future. This book shows them the way.




How Will You Measure Your Life? (Harvard Business Review Classics)


Book Description

In the spring of 2010, Harvard Business School’s graduating class asked HBS professor Clay Christensen to address them—but not on how to apply his principles and thinking to their post-HBS careers. The students wanted to know how to apply his wisdom to their personal lives. He shared with them a set of guidelines that have helped him find meaning in his own life, which led to this now-classic article. Although Christensen’s thinking is rooted in his deep religious faith, these are strategies anyone can use. Since 1922, Harvard Business Review has been a leading source of breakthrough ideas in management practice. The Harvard Business Review Classics series now offers you the opportunity to make these seminal pieces a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world.




Lean Enterprise


Book Description

How well does your organization respond to changing market conditions, customer needs, and emerging technologies when building software-based products? This practical guide presents Lean and Agile principles and patterns to help you move fast at scaleâ??and demonstrates why and how to apply these paradigms throughout your organization, rather than with just one department or team. Through case studies, youâ??ll learn how successful enterprises have rethought everything from governance and financial management to systems architecture and organizational culture in the pursuit of radically improved performance. Discover how Lean focuses on people and teamwork at every level, in contrast to traditional management practices Approach problem-solving experimentally by exploring solutions, testing assumptions, and getting feedback from real users Lead and manage large-scale programs in a way that empowers employees, increases the speed and quality of delivery, and lowers costs Learn how to implement ideas from the DevOps and Lean Startup movements even in complex, regulated environments




The Lean Startup


Book Description

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs—in companies of all sizes—a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.




Open Business Models


Book Description

Provides a diagnostic tool for readers to assess their business model and usher it through a six-stage continuum toward openness. This book also identifies the barriers to creating open business models (such as the not invented here syndrome and the not sold here virus) and explains how to surmount them.




Business Week


Book Description




Innovation, Profit and the Common Good in Higher Education


Book Description

Exploring the current commercialization and innovation policies in higher education, this book examines the the way in which higher education is being transformed to accommodate business methods.