Business Innovation

"Innovation is an act of love—or at least it should be. Always. It is a gesture of empathy, respect, generosity, of one human being’s devotion to another,” writes Mauro Porcini at the beginning of this extraordinary book. It is in part a memoir by one of the world’s leading designers—the first chief design officer at both 3M and Pepsi. But even more, it is a manifesto for a genuine, authentic, and deeply humanistic approach to design, one that aims to create personal and social value first and financial and economic value afterward.

Almost 20 years ago, Clayton Christensen popularized the term disruption in his book The Innovator's Dilemma, describing it as a set of risks that established firms face. Since then, few have closely examined his account. Joshua Gans does so in this book. He looks at companies that have proven resilient and those that have fallen and explains why some companies have successfully managed disruption while others have not.

Disruption dominates innovation theory and practice. But disruption is destructive—displacing jobs, companies, and even entire industries. Are we missing better, and even bigger, opportunities to innovate and grow? With three decades of research, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne reveal another way to innovate and grow. Beyond Disruption redefines and expands the existing view of innovation by introducing a new approach—nondisruptive creation—that is free from the destructive displacement that happens when innovators set out to disrupt.

Companies are fighting the wrong battle. The consensus has been to learn the best practices from Big Tech and imitate them. But new paths for growth aren't created by imitation; they're forged by radical differentiation. In Smart Rivals, Harvard Business School professor Feng Zhu and former Bloomberg journalist Bonnie Cao show business leaders how to create new competitive advantages by offering product features and benefits that tech giants and other competitors cannot match.

From Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs, the "nail it then scale it" method is based on pattern recognition of the timeless principles and key practices used by successful entrepreneurs to repeatedly innovate. These processes and principles have now been distilled into a handbook to guide entrepreneurs and innovative product managers to victory. Stop following conventional wisdom, and join the few entrepreneurs that can consistently take their innovative idea all the way to a successful company launch.

In a world where that is always changing, encouraging creativity and new ideas is important for any organization to succeed. This book looks at key leadership behaviors that motivate teams and create a space for new thoughts and ideas. By exploring how different leadership styles affect creativity, we show how good leaders can help their teams take risks, question the norm, and turn new ideas into reality. With practical tips and real examples, this guide is made for leaders at any level who want to spark creativity and encourage real innovation in their organizations.

Sometimes the events that seem pivotal are just blips, while the more meaningful cultural shifts are hiding in plain sight. Marian Salzman’s job is to uncover those hidden shifts. So what’s in store for the next two decades? In this acutely observed guide, Salzman, whose past predictions have been heralded for coming uncannily close to the way we live now, unpacks the course of human life from the bumpy turn of the millennium through the pandemic era.

Experience a paradigm shift from perceiving AI as a complicated, distant concept to embracing it as a game-changing tool for your business. Your journey to innovation, growth, and market domination with AI starts here!

Brick by Brick takes you inside the LEGO you've never seen. By following the teams that are inventing some of the world's best-loved toys, it spotlights the company's disciplined approach to harnessing creativity and recounts one of the most remarkable business transformations in recent memory.

Innovation isn’t something you do after you get your work done. It’s how you do your work. Organizations all over the world are shedding jobs in record numbers. Yet today they are desperately in need of people with the abilities and skills to think ahead of the curve, delight customers, motivate colleagues, slash costs, and achieve unconventional results.In this practical road map to becoming irreplaceable, global innovation guru and best-selling author Robert B. Tucker reveals why honing your I-Skills (Innovation Skills) may be the smartest career move you’ll make.

A lean strategy is about gaining a competitive edge by offering better quality products at competitive prices and making a sustainable profit by eliminating waste through engaging employees in discovering deeper ways to think about their own jobs and smarter ways of working together. In its current form, lean has been radically effective, but its true powers have yet to be harnessed. The Lean Strategy harnesses that power and delivers a new way of creating value from lean.

50 Business Classics presents the key ideas from classic texts such as My Years with General Motors and Michael Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited to contemporary business lessons from the rise of tech giants like Google, Apple, and Amazon. It contains revealing biographies of luminaries like Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett, as well as lesser-known stories including creation of publishing giant Penguin and Chinese behemoth Alibaba.

Do you want more from business and life than mere survival? Are you constantly dealing with change, increased costs and mounting competition? In The Innovation Opportunity, Grant Ferry assists business owners in navigating the dynamic business environment, taking charge of their destiny and realising their dreams through the power of innovation. The Innovation Opportunity is your complete self-help guide for building innovation into the fabric of your business and getting what you want from life!

Jobs to Be Done gives you a clear-cut framework for thinking about your business, outlines a road map for discovering new markets, new products, and new services, and helps you generate creative opportunities to innovate your way to success.

In this book, enterprise architecting experts Deborah Nightingale and Donna Rhodes offer a framework for enterprise transformation. Successful transformation, they believe, starts with a holistic approach, taking into consideration all facets of the enterprise and its environment rather than focusing solely on one factor-information technology, for example, or organizational structure. This is architecting the future enterprise: creating a blueprint for what the enterprise will look like after the transformation.

How much of innovation is inspiration, and how much is hard work? The answer lies somewhere in the middle, says management thinker Peter Drucker. In this HBR classic from 1985, he argues that innovation is real work that can and should be managed like any other corporate function. Success is more likely to result from the systematic pursuit of opportunities than from a flash of genius. Indeed, most innovative business ideas arise through the methodical analysis of seven areas of opportunity.

We all know a visionary leader when we see one. They're bold and prophetic and at the same time pragmatic. They don't just promote change - they drive it, while inspiring and mobilizing others to do the same. Visionaries like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos possess a host of innate qualities that make them extraordinary, but what truly sets them apart is their ability to turn vision into action. Here, Innosight's Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz introduce a new way of thinking and managing, called "future-back", that enables any manager to become a practical visionary.

When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition, experience, and big data alone don't work. What does? Running disciplined business experiments. And what if companies roll out new products or introduce new customer experiences without running these experiments? They fly blind. That's what Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke shows in this rigorously researched and eye-opening book.

Preeminent leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and Being the Boss coauthor Kent Lineback, found among leaders a widely shared, and mistaken, assumption: that a "good" leader in all other respects would also be an effective leader of innovation. The truth is, leading innovation takes a distinctive kind of leadership, one that unleashes and harnesses the "collective genius" of the people in the organization.

The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities. This is not a book by designers for designers; this is a book for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization's products or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.