Books about Innovation

Long before the Innovator's Dilemma was written, here is Drucker with the same insights about why innovation must be treated as a special child by management, and the challenges faced by it in existing corporations. This review was written after I read the book for the second time (I had read it previously a few years back), and it is incredible how the contents seem more meaningful and relevant on the second reading.

Tags: business management innovation entrepreneurship

The authors use the theories of innovation developed by Christensen to make predictions about various industries such as healthcare, aviation and education. While the specific predictions may or may not have direct meaning to one's work, they serve as examples of how the innovation theories (refer "The Innovator's Dilemma") can be used in a practical manner. The examples themselves are very fascinating.

Tags: leadership innovation

Wow! What a book! Christensen's insight that organizations cannot produce disruptive innovations to its existing products is both amazing and disturbing at the same time. The book explains how rational and proper behavior on the part of managers can prevent innovation and shows that technical and managerial incompetence does not necessarily lie behind failures of innovation. Reading this book shows how easily we can fall into the trap of blaming people for failures when, in reality, correct processes, proper management and effective people may still lead to bad results because of the underlying rules.

Tags: leadership innovation

The author reviews all the different ways that persons and teams may be mentally blocked in finding solutions to a problem. Some factors are particular to the individual, some are environment-specific, like culture, organization, etc. Well presented ideas.

Tags: innovation design

The author writes about his thoughts on the design process. Design is very different from problem solving since it is about value creation and possibilities. The author provides different ideas about how to innovate and produce new design. I have two gripes with this book. One is that the format of the book, while innovative, makes the content difficult to follow. The other is that the design notations from the author are copyrighted and thus limited in their use.

Tags: innovation

A very misleading title. De Bono is the master of thinking outside the box, and here, he confuses being imaginative with being interesting. In fact, the author goes to much pains to explain that he is not talking about being a good conversationalist. My question is: why confuse the reader then? But once you understand the real purpose of the author, the book is very stimulating with a lot of mental exercises. Trying them will help you change the way you look at various events. And there are quite a lot of amusing facts that a trivia fan would love to collect.

Tags: innovation

The authors make an attempt to understand the reasons why some ideas spread like wildfire while others remain stagnant. The keys for an idea to succeed is that is it should be a Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible and Emotional Story. There are many good examples to illustrate the various concepts. Evidence for the ideas is mostly anecdotal, but very thought-provoking, despite that.

Tags: business management innovation marketing

Edward de Bono details his famous six thinking hats tactic for constructive thinking. The idea behind the technique is to create an artificial setting for thinking about the situation from different viewpoints and angles. The intention is to gain a full understaning of the problem so that an effective solution can be found. This technique can be contrasted to the usual method of each person taking their stand and trying to defend it. Several respected large companies use this technique.

Tags: innovation

Using the concept of evolution, Seth Godin explains how companies, by expanding their vision and ability to change, can evolve to survive and beat market conditions. Companies can learn to "zoom" and not have to fight with change management. It is a well-meaning book, but it has a few problems. It is more directed to companies with dysfunctional and rigid environments. However, such companies need a serious overhaul of their corporate culture, leadership and policies to become more dynamic, which is usually possible only when the company is undergoing significant growth or losses.

A growing company usually is willing to experiment and adopt strategies and tactics that have potential. The problem is that only some potential ideas can be exploited successfully to provide adequate returns within a reasonable time frame, and the others will be discarded. This provides the opening for startups to take discarded ideas that may be profitable for them (but not profitable to the growing company) and attempt to create a growing market. This problem is explained in "The Innovator's Dilemma" and although Seth Godin has tried to explain it away through his evolution concept, he has only given it a superficial treatment.

The general failure of the book is that it attempts to run an entire discussion using a single metaphor and sometimes it stretches it too far.

Tags: business management innovation

Creativity, like many other business concepts, is an elusive idea, even for those who are creative. What works for some may not work for others. You cannot teach people to be creative, but you can provide ideas for creative people to improve themselves and be more productive.

In that sense, Tharp's book provides some useful insights into activities and behaviors that can produce ideas and reduce dead time. However, it is surrounded by a lot of fluffy stories that turn this book into more of an auto-biography than a self-help book. Which would have okay, if the author was something other than a Broadway choreographer. I suppose it is a worth a quick browse, but nothing more than that.

Tags: innovation creativity

This book reminded me, rather surprisingly, of Simon Singh's "Big Bang" book because both seem to use historical events and famous inventors/discoverers. But while Singh was content to be a passive observer of historical events, Berkun attempts to fit his view of innovation onto examples that have been cherry-picked.

Great books have an urgency to them. They look forward. The great books of innovation, "The Innovator's Dilemma" and "Innovation and Entrepreneurship", possess that quality of explaining why innovation fails sometimes and why it succeeds. In contrast, "The Myths of Innovation" can be termed, in kind terms, a very long term paper, filled with references and footnotes (literally splattered throughout the book). Very well researched, but no soul.

The book provides no reason why it exists. Some of the "myths" that it attempts to debunk are hardly myths, if you have spent more than a minute thinking about them. One fundamental error in the book's outlook is that it does not realize that if A implies B, the opposite of A does NOT necessarily imply B. Even if you do the opposite of every myth in the book, you may not be on your way to innovation. In fact, counter-examples can be found to suggest that perhaps you may need to believe in one or more of the myths - for example, maybe you need to lock yourself and be a sole inventor.

Frankly, this is one of the most disappointing books I have ever read. This is not a book written for readers. It is a mercenary book written to be sold. It belongs on the same shelf as "Go Put Your Strengths to Work", another book whose sole purpose is to serve as a vehicle for the author's consulting operations.

Tags: innovation management