Our Favorite Innovation Books
Business Strategy Innovation wants to share with you some of the texts we've found worthwhile on the
subject of innovation. If you have other suggestions of meaningful volumes, please submit your
recommendations on our Contact Us page.
All of these resources are available for purchase on Amazon.com.
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The Future of Management
Gary Hamel with Bill Breen
From Publishers Weekly
Though this authoritative examination of today's static corporate management systems reads like a business school treatise, it isn't the same-old thing. Hamel, a well-known business thinker and author (Leading the Revolution), advocates that dogma be rooted out and a new future be imagined and invented. To aid managers and leaders on this mission, Hamel offers case studies and measured analysis of management innovators like Google and W.L. Gore (makers of Gore-Tex), then lists lessons that can be drawn from them. He doesn't gloss over how difficult it will be to reinvent management, comparing the new and needed shift in thinking to Darwin's abandoning creationist traditions and physicists who had to look beyond Newton's clockwork laws to discover quantum mechanics. But the steps needed to make such a profound shift aren't clearly outlined here either. The book serves primarily as an invitation to shed age-old systems and processes and think differently. There's little humor and few punchy catchphrases - the book has less sparkle than Jeffrey Pfeffer's What Were They Thinking? - but its content will likely appeal to managers accustomed to b-school textbooks and tired of gimmicky business evangelism. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Reviews
If companies now innovate by creating new products or new business models...why can't they do the same in how they manage organizations? --The New York Times, December 30, 2007
Like many great inventions, management practices have a shelf life...Gary Hamel explains how to jettison the weak ones and embrace the ones that work. --Fortune, September 19, 2007
There's much here that will resonate with forward-thinking managers. --BusinessWeek, October 8, 2007
Book Description
What fuels long-term business success? Not operational excellence, technology breakthroughs, or new business models, but management innovation - new ways of mobilizing talent, allocating resources, and formulating strategies. Through history, management innovation has enabled companies to cross new performance thresholds and build enduring advantages.
In The Future of Management, Gary Hamel argues that organizations need management innovation now more than ever. Why? The management paradigm of the last century - centered on control and efficiency - no longer suffices in a world where adaptability and creativity drive business success. To thrive in the future, companies must reinvent management.
Hamel explains how to turn your company into a serial management innovator, revealing:
- The make-or-break challenges that will determine competitive success in an age of relentless, head-snapping change.
- The toxic effects of traditional management beliefs.
- The unconventional management practices generating breakthrough results in “modern management pioneers.”
- The radical principles that will need to become part of every company’s “management DNA.”
- The steps your company can take now to build your “management advantage.”
Practical and profound, The Future of Management features examples from Google, W.L. Gore, Whole Foods, IBM, Samsung, Best Buy, and other blue-ribbon management innovators.
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Innovation to the Core
A Blueprint for Transforming the Way Your Company Innovates
Rowan Gibson and Peter Skarzynski
Book Description
If you're like most business leaders, innovation now tops your corporate agenda. But despite all the talk and excitement about the importance of innovation, managers have so far found scant help for innovating in a systematic way that fuels consistent growth and sustained success.
In Innovation to the Core, Strategos CEO Peter Skarzynski and business strategist Rowan Gibson change all that. They share the accumulated wisdom from Strategos--the consulting firm Skarzynski co-founded with Gary Hamel that helps clients instill innovation into their very core. Drawing on a wealth of stories and examples, the book shows how companies of every stripe have overcome the barriers to successful, profitable innovation. You'll find parts devoted to crucial topics--such as how to organize the discovery process, generate strategic insights, enlarge your innovation pipeline, and maximize your return on innovation. Frequent hands-on tools--frameworks, checklists, probing questions--help you put the book's ideas into action.
Crafted in close coordination with Gary Hamel--the man who Fortune magazine has called "the world's leading expert on business strategy"--Innovation to the Core is the definitive fieldbook for making innovation a core competence in your organization.
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Innovation Tournaments
Creating and Selecting Exceptional Opportunities
Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich
Book Description
Managers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists all seek to maximize the financial returns from innovation, and profits are driven largely by the quality of the opportunities they pursue. Based on a structured and process-driven approach this book demonstrates how to systematically identify exceptional opportunities for innovation.
An innovation tournament, just like its counterpart in sports, starts with a large number of candidates, with opportunities as the players. These opportunities are pitted against each other until only the exceptional survive.
This book provides a principled approach for the effective management of innovation tournaments - identifying a wealth of promising opportunities and then evaluating and filtering them intelligently for greatest profitability. With a set of practical tools for creating and identifying new opportunities, it guides the reader in evaluating and screening opportunities. The book demonstrates how to construct an innovation portfolio and how to align the innovation process with an organization's competitive strategy.
Innovation Tournaments employs quirky, fresh examples ranging from movies to medical devices. The authors' tool kit is built on their extensive research, their entrepreneurial backgrounds, and their teaching and consulting work with many highly innovative organizations
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Innovate with Influence
Tales of a High-Tech Intrapreneur
Steve Todd
Book Description
Ever think about joining a large corporation but were concerned that your great ideas would become lost?
Looking for a job as an entrepreneur but have discovered that startup funding is a little tight?
Are you an innovative college grad looking for a creative outlet but not sure that a big company is the way to go?
Innovate With Influence describes the intrapreneur , an emerging breed of employee that specializes in leveraging the resources of large corporations in order to drive new ideas into successful product offerings.
In this book Steve Todd covers the step-by-step process of creating new ideas, how to work influentially with teammates, and how to deliver new, high-tech products into the hands of customers. Steve's methods are not based on observation; they are based on his own track record at large corporations.
Learn the habits of highly successful intrapreneurs as Steve discusses the building of intrapreneurial influence, the most important quality for innovators at large corporations. Learn the reasoning behind limiting corporate visibility in order to maximize effectiveness. Learn the trade-offs between staying in the trenches and taking a management role; these choices impact innovative effectiveness. And of course, learn the most effective habit for generating the specific ideas that will become adopted by a corporation.
Innovate With Influence is a handbook for intrapreneurs.
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The Strategy Paradox
The Strategy Paradox - Why committing to success leads to failure (and what to do about it)
Michael E. Raynor
Review
"One of the most important, realistic and useful books on strategy ever written. With consummate clarity and withering logic, Raynor confronts and resolves the paradox that while strategy requires commitment, much about the future is simply unknowable. It is an absolutely brilliant, lucidly written piece of scholarship."
--Clayton M. Christensen, Professor, Harvard Business School and author of the bestselling The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution
Book Description
A compelling vision. Bold leadership. Decisive action. Unfortunately, these prerequisites of success are almost always the ingredients of failure, too. In fact, most managers seeking to maximize their chances for glory are often unwittingly setting themselves up for ruin. The sad truth is that most companies have left their futures almost entirely to chance, and don’t even realize it. The reason? Managers feel they must make choices with far-reaching consequences today, but must base those choices on assumptions about a future they cannot predict. It is this collision between commitment and uncertainty that creates THE STRATEGY PARADOX.
This paradox sets up a ubiquitous but little-understood tradeoff. Because managers feel they must base their strategies on assumptions about an unknown future, the more ambitious of them hope their guesses will be right – or that they can somehow adapt to the turbulence that will arise. In fact, only a small number of lucky daredevils prosper, while many more unfortunate, but no less capable managers find themselves at the helms of sinking ships. Realizing this, even if only intuitively, most managers shy away from the bold commitments that success seems to demand, choosing instead timid, unremarkable strategies, sacrificing any chance at greatness for a better chance at mere survival.
Michael E. Raynor, coauthor of the bestselling The Innovator's Solution explains how leaders can break this tradeoff and achieve results historically reserved for the fortunate few even as they reduce the risks they must accept in the pursuit of success. In the cutthroat world of competitive strategy, this is as close as you can come to getting something for nothing.
Drawing on leading-edge scholarship and extensive original research, Raynor’s revolutionary principle of Requisite Uncertainty yields a clutch of critical, counter-intuitive findings. Among them:
-- The Board should not evaluate the CEO based on the company’s performance, but instead on the firm’s strategic risk profile
-- The CEO should not drive results, but manage uncertainty
-- Business unit leaders should not focus on execution, but on making strategic choices
-- Line managers should not worry about strategic risk, but devote themselves to delivering on commitments
With detailed case studies of success and failure at Sony, Microsoft, Vivendi Universal, Johnson & Johnson, AT&T and other major companies in industries from financial services to energy, Raynor presents a concrete framework for strategic action that allows companies to seize today’s opportunities while simultaneously preparing for tomorrow’s promise.
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Fast Second
How Smart Companies Bypass Radical Innovation to Enter and Dominate New Markets
Constantinos C. Markides, Paul A. Geroski
Review
"...a ring of real wisdom..." (Financial Times, 21st September 2005)
Review
“This is more than just an interesting new business book. It is a bold challenge of the
pervasive conventional wisdom of building breakthrough, innovative capability as a foundation
stone of competitive advantage. Through their strong and clear argument and their richly
detailed examples, these leading strategic thinkers present a provocative set of ideas that
no manager (or management teacher) can afford to ignore.”
--Christopher A. Bartlett, Thomas D. Casserly, Jr. Professor of Business Administration,
Harvard Business School
"Fast Second will force cutting-edge leaders of big, established companies to totally rethink
radical innovation. Conquering radical new markets is about timing and a smart strategy for
scaling them up, not creating them."
--Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, Stanford W. Ascherman M.D. Professor, Stanford University, and
coauthor, Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos
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Seeing What's Next
Using the Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change
Clayton M. Christensen, Erik A. Roth, Scott D. Anthony
Inc. Magazine, September 2004
Just as kids await the latest Harry Potter installment, so do business leaders look for
Clayton M. Christensen’s next offering.
Book Description
When a disruptive innovation is launched, it changes the entire industry and every firm
operating within it.
This book argues that it is possible to predict which companies will win and which will
lose in a specific situation — and provides a practical framework for doing so.
Most books on innovation — including Christensen’s previous two books — approached innovation
from the inside-out, showing firms how they can create innovations inside their own companies.
This book is written from an “outside-in” perspective, showing how executives, investors, and
analysts can assess the impact of a new innovation on the firms they have a vested interest in.
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The Innovator's Solution
Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor
From Publishers Weekly
Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma) analyzes the strategies that allow corporations to
successfully grow new businesses and outpace the other players in the marketplace.
Christensen's earlier book examined how focusing on profits can destroy even well-run
corporations, while this book focuses on companies expanding by being "disruptors" who are
able to outpace their entrenched competition. The authors (Christensen is a professor at
Harvard Business School and Raynor, a director at Deloitte Research) examine the nine business
decisions integral to growth, including product development, organizational structure,
financing and key customer base. They cite such companies as IBM, AT&T, Sony, Microsoft and
others to illustrate their points. Generally, the writing is clear and specific. For example,
in discussing whether a company has the resources necessary for growth, the authors say,
"In order to be confident that managers have developed the skills required to succeed at a new
assignment, one should examine the sorts of problems they have wrestled with in the past.
It is not as important that managers have succeeded with the problem as it is for them to have
wrestled with it and developed the skills and intuition for how to meet the challenge
successfully the next time around"; they then provide a real-life example of a software company.
Similar important strategies give readers insights that they can use in their own workplaces.
People looking for quick fixes may find the charts, diagrams and extensive footnotes daunting,
but readers familiar with more technical business management tomes will find this one both
stimulating and beneficial.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Fast Company, September 2003
"...valuable tool for every aspiring upstart--whether you're inside a billion-dollar company
or have a billion-dollar glimer in your eye."
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The Innovator's Dilemma
The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business
Clayton M. Christensen
Amazon.com
What do the Honda Supercub, Intel's 8088 processor, and hydraulic excavators have in common?
They are all examples of disruptive technologies that helped to redefine the competitive
landscape of their respective markets. These products did not come about as the result of
successful companies carrying out sound business practices in established markets. In The
Innovator's Dilemma, author Clayton M. Christensen shows how these and other products cut into
the low end of the marketplace and eventually evolved to displace high-end competitors and
their reigning technologies.
At the heart of The Innovator's Dilemma is how a successful company with established products
keeps from being pushed aside by newer, cheaper products that will, over time, get better
and become a serious threat. Christensen writes that even the best-managed companies, in
spite of their attention to customers and continual investment in new technology, are
susceptible to failure no matter what the industry, be it hard drives or consumer retailing.
Succinct and clearly written, The Innovator's Dilemma is an important book that belongs on
every manager's bookshelf. Highly recommended. --Harry C. Edwards
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From AudioFile
When new technologies become available, how do established companies take advantage of these
innovations without disrupting existing relationships with customers and stockholders?
The managerial formula that solves this dilemma is far from simple, but this abridgment of
the author's 1997 book will be easily understood by anyone interested in technological
revolutions. The clarity of these broad-brush ideas is just plain fascinating. The reader's
gravity and dramatic precision will be distracting for many people, but only for the first
few minutes. After that, the big ideas in this program take over and captivate the listener's
attention. T.W. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine--
Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
--This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.
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Dealing with Darwin
How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution
Geoffrey Moore
Book Description
Bestselling author Geoffrey Moore shows companies how to rise to the challenge of natural selection—and master their own evolution
Geoffrey Moore is one of the most respected and bestselling names in business books. In his widely quoted Crossing the Chasm, he identified and addressed the greatest challenge facing new ventures. Now he’s back with a book for established businesses that need to learn how to adapt—or suffer the slow declines into marginalized performance that have characterized so many Fortune 500 icons in recent years.
Deregulation, globalization, and e-commerce are exerting unprecedented pressures on company profits. In this new economic ecosystem, companies must dramatically differentiate from their direct competitors—or risk declining performance and eventual extinction. But how do companies choose the right innovation strategy? Or overcome internal inertia that resists the kind of radical commitments needed to truly set the company’s offers apart?
Illustrating his arguments with more than one hundred examples and a full-length case study based on his unprecedented access to Cisco Systems, Moore shows businesses how to meet today’s Darwinian challenges, whether they’re producing commodity products or customized services. For companies whose competitive differentiation to the marketplace is still effective, he demonstrates how innovations in execution can help boost productivity, whether a company is competing in a growth market, a mature market, or even a declining market. For companies in danger of succumbing to competitive pressures, he shows how to overcome inertia by engaging the entire corporate community in an unceasing commitment to innovate and evolve.
For any business competing in today’s eat-or-be-eaten economic jungle, this groundbreaking guide shows not only how to survive, but also thrive.
From Publishers Weekly
"Innovation" is one of the great buzzwords of management theory, but this treatise accords it a thoroughgoing analysis. Management consultant Moore, author of the bestselling Crossing the Chasm, argues that companies can escape the marginless hell of commodity and price competition only through innovations that differentiate their products from their competitors' in the minds of consumers. He elaborates a taxonomy of 15 "innovation types," from "disruptive" breakthrough technologies like Apple's iTunes to more mundane marketing innovations like hiring a sports superstar to endorse athletic shoes. Unlike many business futurists, Moore doesn't exalt innovation for its own sake, insisting it must be tied to concrete business goals. To help companies determine the right-and wrong-strategies for innovation, he develops an analytical framework that distinguishes emerging from mature market categories and "complex systems" companies that sell pricey customized projects to a few customers from "volume operations " companies that sell standardized products to the masses. Moore illustrates these ideas with real-world examples, biased toward tech-sector companies; an extended case study of innovation-management at networking leviathan Cisco Systems forms the backbone of the book. Moore's approach is somewhat theoretical and replete with diagrams that feature sine waves and fractals. Fortunately, his treatment remains lucid and commonsensical, and offers a wealth of insights for thoughtful managers.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Crossing the Chasm
Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers
Geoffrey Moore
Book Description
Author Geoffrey Moore makes the case that high-tech products require marketing strategies that differ from those in other industries. His chasm theory describes how high-tech products initially sell well, mainly to a technically literate customer base, but then hit a lull as marketing professionals try to cross the chasm to mainstream buyers. This pattern, says Moore, is unique to the high-tech industry.
Moore suggests remedies for the problem that can help businesses meet their long-term goals. He coaches marketing professionals on how to move slowly through the gulf, teaching them to create profiles and target specific segments of the population rather than trying to plow right into the mainstream. He cites examples of successful chasm crossings by such companies as Apple, Tandem, Oracle, and Sun, showing what they all had in common and exposing the different weaknesses in their strategies. Moore also assigns responsibility for success to programmers and developers by suggesting they design a "whole product model." Here, because integration tasks are daunting to the mainstream market, all the components of a technological product must be in one package. Moore also describes strategies for competing with rival companies and assessing the best distribution channels for penetrating the target market.
Written not just for marketing specialists but for all employees whose futures ride on the success of a technical product, Crossing the Chasm delivers crucial information in an engaging, readable tone.
From the Publisher
High-Tech Marketing Expert Identifies the Greatest Challenge Facing New Ventures and Shows How to Address It
Every year, according to high-tech marketing expert Geoffrey Moore, millions of dollars invested in high-tech entrepreneurial ventures are lost trying to "cross the chasm" from early market success to mainstream market leadership. Moore, President of Geoffrey Moore Consulting, identifies and addresses the key challenges facing such ventures in the long-awaited paperback edition of Crossing the Chasm: How to Win Mainstream Markets for Technology Products
Targeted at venture capitalists, product managers, and tech marketers, Moore's book identifies a fundamental flaw in the standard high-tech marketing model, which postulates smooth sales growth through a series of well-defined, ever-larger markets. In fact, says Moore, there are really two, fundamentally separate phases in the development of any high-tech market: an early phase that builds from a few, highly visible, visionary customers; and a mainstream phase, where the buying decisions fall predominantly to pragmatists. Transitioning between these two phases is anything but smooth, and confidently assuming that success in the early market will translate into mainstream success is the fatal error that causes so many high-flying start-ups to crash into the chasm.
Crossing the Chasm grows from Moore's extensive consulting experience at Regis McKenna and at his own firm, working with hundreds of technology ventures struggling with these problems. The transition, he notes, is always perilous: typically, the new venture commits significant resources to modifications promised to secure its initial base of early market customers. The venture requires continued growth to support these commitments, growth into the lucrative mainstream markets. But these markets require a very different approach from that of the early visionaries; and if a company does not attack them properly, it will quickly fall short of projections and find itself in trouble. Moore's book presents specific strategies in marketing and all other areas of the business to help technology companies cross this critical chasm successfully.
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Blue Ocean Strategy
How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant
W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
From Publishers Weekly
Kim and Mauborgne's blue ocean metaphor elegantly summarizes their vision of the kind of expanding, competitor-free markets that innovative companies can navigate. Unlike "red oceans," which are well explored and crowded with competitors, "blue oceans" represent "untapped market space" and the "opportunity for highly profitable growth." The only reason more big companies don't set sail for them, they suggest, is that "the dominant focus of strategy work over the past twenty-five years has been on competition-based red ocean strategies"-i.e., finding new ways to cut costs and grow revenue by taking away market share from the competition. With this groundbreaking book, Kim and Mauborgne-both professors at France's INSEAD, the second largest business school in the world-aim to repair that bias. Using dozens of examples-from Southwest Airlines and the Cirque du Soleil to Curves and Starbucks-they present the tools and frameworks they've developed specifically for the task of analyzing blue oceans. They urge companies to "value innovation" that focuses on "utility, price, and cost positions," to "create and capture new demand" and to "focus on the big picture, not the numbers." And while their heavyweight analytical tools may be of real use only to serious strategy planners, their overall vision will inspire entrepreneurs of all stripes, and most of their ideas are presented in a direct, jargon-free manner. Theirs is not the typical business management book's vague call to action; it is a precise, actionable plan for changing the way companies do business with one resounding piece of advice: swim for open waters.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Fort Worth Star Telegram, 14 February 2005
"Companies struggling to stay afloat in the market's...red oceans would do well to look into Blue Ocean Strategy."
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Myths of Innovation
Scott Berkun
Reviews
"…Small, simple, powerful: an innovative book about innovation."
--Don Norman, Nielsen Norman Group, Northwestern University; author of Emotional Design and Design of Everyday Things
Book Description
How do you know whether a hot technology will succeed or fail? Or where the next big idea will come from? The best answers come not from the popular myths we tell about innovation, but instead from time-tested truths that explain how we've made it this far. This book shows the way.
In The Myths of Innovation, bestselling author Scott Berkun takes a careful look at innovation history, including the software and Internet Age, to reveal how ideas truly become successful innovations-truths that people can apply to today's challenges. Using dozens of examples from the history of technology, business, and the arts, you'll learn how to convert the knowledge you have into ideas that can change the world.
* Why all innovation is a collaborative process
* How innovation depends on persuasion
* Why problems are more important than solutions
* How the good innovation is the enemy of the great
* Why the biggest challenge is knowing when it's good enough
"For centuries before Google, MIT, and IDEO, modern hotbeds of innovation, we struggled to explain any kind of creation, from the universe itself to the multitudes of ideas around us. While we can make atomic bombs, and dry-clean silk ties, we still don't have satisfying answers for simple questions like: Where do songs come from? Are there an infinite variety of possible kinds of cheese? How did Shakespeare and Stephen King invent so much, while we're satisfied watching sitcom reruns? Our popular answers have been unconvincing, enabling misleading, fantasy-laden myths to grow strong." -- Scott Berkun, from the text.
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?What If!: How to Start a Creative Revolution at Work
Dave Allan, Matt Kingdon, Kris Murrin, Daz Rudkin
Review
"...I found the book easy to read and understand, full of common sense and curiously compelling..." (City to Cities, August/September 2002)
"...it's one of those rare books that could make a radical difference to the way you work and see the world, whilst being a genuine source of pleasure to read..." (Research Magazine, September 2002)
Book Description
We all know how important creativity is at work. New ideas, fresh solutions, and innovative approaches are always talked about, but rarely ever practiced.
?Whatif!, Second Edition gives you the power, insight, and courage to capture the essence of creativity at work. This one-of-a-kind book breaks creativity into six practical behaviors and shows you how all of us--not just the wacky genuis--is packed with creative potential.
This fully updated and expanded edition explores areas that the first edition did not, filled with new insights, stories, and cases it will help you find or recapture your creativity with proven exercises that will help unlock the creative potential in anyone.
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Fast Company
Magazine
From Amazon.com
Since 1995, Fast Company has been an informative and vital voice of the changing business
industry. The monthly magazine is a beacon to new industries, especially those tied to the
Internet, but offers more. Inside are smart attitudes and information that give entrepreneurs
and business professionals the particulars of leadership and organization, no matter what the
trade. Find key ingredients of working in teams or read a candid interview with the leaders
of today's leading-edge companies. The magazine also offers practical business tools and
tactics, from must-have gadgets to how to handle voluminous amounts of e-mail. Ideas come
from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Harvard, and even Las Vegas. The magazine dubbed the
entrepreneurship and consulting movement "Free-Agent Nation," and overnight became the bible
for those working for themselves. --Doug Thomas
From the Publisher
Business magazine of ideas and tools, profiles and evaluations on the ways business works.
Advises readers on how to compete in the global business environment. The magazine debunks
old myths and discovers new legends, and covers smart people working in smart companies all
while having serious fun.
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