The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That Win

The Four Steps to the Epiphany launched the Lean Startup approach to new ventures. It was the first book to offer that startups are not smaller versions of large companies and that new ventures are different than existing ones.

Startups search for business models while existing companies execute them. The book offers the practical and proven four-step Customer Development process for search and offers insight … [ Read more ]

Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers

Co-created by 470 “Business Model Canvas” practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically … [ Read more ]

The Little Black Book of Innovation: How It Works, How To Do It

“Too often, companies invest in the trappings of innovation — boot camps, workshops, the occasional visit to Silicon Valley, skunkworks — instead of the actual work of innovation. In this readable, practical book, Anthony draws on years of consulting experience to explain how to make innovation actually happen. Chockablock full of real stories of successes and failures, red flags and remedies, the book is a … [ Read more ]

The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators

Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton Christensen build on what we know about disruptive innovation to show how individuals can develop the skills necessary to move progressively from idea to impact.

By identifying behaviors of the world’s best innovators—from leaders at Amazon and Apple to those at Google, Skype, and Virgin Group—the authors outline five discovery skills that distinguish innovative entrepreneurs and executives from ordinary managers: … [ Read more ]

Reverse Innovation: Create Far From Home, Win Everywhere

Reverse Innovation is the new business idea everyone is talking about. Why? Because it presents the blueprint for scaling growth in emerging markets, and importing low-cost and high impact innovations to mature ones.

Innovation is no longer the exclusive domain of the Silicon Valley elite. Reverse Innovation will open your eyes to the fact that the dynamics of global innovation are changing—and if you want your … [ Read more ]

The First Mile: A Launch Manual for Getting Great Ideas into the Market

That first mile—where an innovation moves from an idea on paper to the market—is often plagued by failure. In fact, less than one percent of ideas launched by big companies end up having real impact. The ideas aren’t the problem. It’s the process.

The First Mile focuses on the critical moment when an innovator moves from planning to reality. It is a perilous place where hidden … [ Read more ]

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

The printing press, the pencil, the flush toilet, the battery—these are all great ideas. But where do they come from? What kind of environment breeds them? What sparks the flash of brilliance? How do we generate the groundbreaking ideas that push forward our lives, our society, our culture? Steven Johnson’s answers are revelatory as he identifies the seven key patterns behind genuine innovation, and traces … [ Read more ]

Kill the Company: End the Status Quo, Start an Innovation Revolution

In the ever-changing world of business, we’ve arrived at a point where process has trumped culture, where the race toward efficiency has made us complacent and unable to reach our potential. Stuck in the land of status quo, we’ve forgotten how to think. And the very structures put in place to help businesses grow are now holding them back. It’s time to Kill the Company.

What … [ Read more ]

The Wide Lens: A New Strategy for Innovation

How can great companies do everything right – identify real customer needs, deliver excellent innovations, beat their competitors to market – and still fail?

The sad truth is that many companies fail because they focus too intensely on their own innovations, and then neglect the innovation ecosystems on which their success depends. In our increasingly interdependent world, winning requires more than just delivering on your own … [ Read more ]

Best Practices Are Stupid: 40 Ways to Out-Innovate the Competition

What if almost everything you know about creating a culture of innovation is wrong? What if the way you are measuring innovation is choking it? What if your market research is asking all of the wrong questions?

It’s time to innovate the way you innovate.
— Hire people you don’t like. Bring in the right mix of people to unleash your team’s full potential.
— Asking for … [ Read more ]

Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity

When Hugh MacLeod was a struggling young copywriter, living in a YMCA, he started to doodle on the backs of business cards while sitting at a bar. Those cartoons eventually led to a popular blog – gapingvoid.com – and a reputation for pithy insight and humor, in both words and pictures.

MacLeod has opinions on everything from marketing to the meaning of life, but one of … [ Read more ]

The Sources of Innovation

It has long been assumed that new product innovations are typically developed by product manufacturers, an assumption that has inevitably had a major impact on innovation-related research and activities ranging from how firms organize their research and development to how governments measure innovation. In this synthesis of his seminal research, von Hippel challenges that basic assumption and demonstrates that innovation occurs in different places in … [ Read more ]

Democratizing Innovation

Innovation is rapidly becoming democratized. Users, aided by improvements in computer and communications technology, increasingly can develop their own new products and services. These innovating users—both individuals and firms—often freely share their innovations with others, creating user-innovation communities and a rich intellectual commons. In Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel looks closely at this emerging system of user-centered innovation. He explains why and when users find … [ Read more ]

Grabbing Lightning: Building a Capability for Breakthrough Innovation

Established companies are clamoring for breakthrough innovation, but are often hamstrung by the highly reliable, repeatable processes of their management systems. Based on years of research, Grabbing Lightning shows how twelve companies have tried to develop a capability for sustainable breakthrough innovation and outlines best practices for your organization.

The authors show how the management system for innovation is different from the traditional one in that … [ Read more ]

The Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine – and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It

For true innovation, you may need to think outside the box-and outside the company.

Innovation is vital to the success of an organization. But often, “GroupThink” and “ExpertThink” stifle new ideas. This book presents the idea of using outsiders-people who are not a permanent part of a particular group or constrained by its preconceptions-to stimulate innovation. They may be employees from other parts of the company, … [ Read more ]

Sketching User Experiences

Whatever you’re designing — software or toasters, microprocessors or skyscrapers — you need to “put user experience front and center,” says Bill Buxton. Here, Buxton makes a passionate case for a better way to design interactive products and the experiences surrounding them. The centerpiece is a technique humans have used successfully for centuries: sketching.

Writers’ Workshops & the Work of Making Things: Patterns, Poetry…

For more than 100 years, Writers’ Workshops have offered writers deep and generous insights into their own work: insights that have helped them improve, and often inspired them to take their work in exciting new directions. Recently, technical, scientific, and business professionals have also discovered the immense value of the Writers’ Workshop format in solving their creative problems. Now, an experienced leader and participant shows … [ Read more ]

Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128

Over the past decade however there has been a growing interest in the role which territory (in the form of regions, industrial districts or innovative milieux) plays in fostering technical change and industrialinnovation…One of the many virtues of this book is the way it penetrates beneath these superficial similarities, exposing a more complex, more telling set of differences which help to explain the very different … [ Read more ]

The Seeds of Innovation: Cultivating the Synergy That Fosters New Ideas

Innovation thought leader Elaine Dundon offers a “how-to” prescription for building creative and strategic innovation skills at all levels of an organization (rather than focusing on decision-making levels only) – and explains how to produce measurable results that translate directly to the bottom line.

Using field-tested concepts and practical examples, and featuring easy-to-apply processes and concrete thinking tools, this straight-talking book provides a broadly applicable guide … [ Read more ]

Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators: From Idea to Execution

In 10 Rules for Strategic Innovators, business professors Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble describe how companies make mistakes between innovation and execution, and outline what it takes to build a successful new business while maintaining excellence in an existing one. Based on an in-depth study, their book identifies what organizations must know to set aside key assumptions; borrow assets from an established business; and learn … [ Read more ]