Business Innovation

A trio of experts on high-tech business strategy and innovation reveal the principles that have made platform businesses the most valuable firms in the world and the first trillion-dollar companies.

What can you learn from the world’s most successful companies? The Marvel Studios Story will help you understand and adopt the competitive strategies, workplace culture, and daily business practices that enabled a struggling comic book publisher to parlay the power of myth and storytelling to become one of history’s most successful movie studios.

A framework for achieving superior rates of organic growth. Achieving superior growth through innovation is a top strategic priority for all companies. Yet most management teams struggle to reach their firm’s ambitious growth targets and suffer slow growth. What distinguishes these growth laggards from growth leaders like IBM, Nike, LEGO, American Express, Amazon, and Samsung that realize their full potential for growth? Wharton professor George S. Day shows that growth leaders use their innovation prowess to accelerate their growth at a faster rate.

How have Japanese companies become world leaders in the automotive and electronics industries, among others? What is the secret of their success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, are the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies.

This book stitches together a complete design journey from beginning to end in a way that you've likely never seen before, guiding listeners (you) step-by-step in a practical way from the initial spark of an idea all the way to scaling it into a better business. Design a Better Business includes a comprehensive set of tools (over 20 total!) and skills that will help you harness opportunity from uncertainty by building the right team(s) and balancing your point of view against new findings from the outside world.

Rethink how your organization creates, delivers, and captures value - or risk becoming irrelevant. If you listen to nothing else on business model innovation, listen to these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you reach new customers and stay ahead of your competitors by reinventing your business model.

How Creativity Rules the World shows that, despite contrary beliefs, creativity can be taught and learned by anyone. Creativity is an inexhaustible resource that is the key to thriving in the business world and beyond. This timeless guide promises to make the creative process of successful seven-figure artists and billion-dollar entrepreneurs—as well as Maria’s own—accessible and actionable for you to take the power of their ideas to the next level.

What really distinguishes the people who literally change the world - those creative geniuses who give us one breakthrough after another? What differentiates Marie Curie or Elon Musk from the merely creative, the many one-hit wonders among us? Melissa Schilling, one of the world's leading experts on innovation, invites us into the lives of eight people - Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Elon Musk, Dean Kamen, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, and Steve Jobs - to identify the traits and experiences that drove them to make spectacular breakthroughs, over and over again.

As a technology pioneer at MIT and as the leader of three successful start-ups, Kevin Ashton experienced firsthand the all-consuming challenge of creating something new. Now, in a tour-de-force narrative 20 years in the making, Ashton leads us on a journey through humanity's greatest creations to uncover the surprising truth behind who creates and how they do it.

Chris Anderson takes you to the front lines of a new industrial revolution as today’s entrepreneurs, using open source design and 3-D printing, bring manufacturing to the desktop. In an age of custom-fabricated, do-it-yourself product design and creation, the collective potential of a million garage tinkerers and enthusiasts is about to be unleashed, driving a resurgence of American manufacturing. A generation of "Makers" using the Web’s innovation model will help drive the next big wave in the global economy, as the new technologies of digital design and rapid prototyping gives everyone the power to invent.

When faced with new challenges, it’s easy to feel our solutions need to be equally unprecedented. We think we need a revolution. But what if this is a big mistake? In Evolutionary Ideas, Sam Tatam shows how behavioral science and evolutionary psychology can help us solve tomorrow’s challenges, not by divining something the world has never seen, but by borrowing from yesterday’s solutions–often in the most unexpected ways.

In Fusion Strategy, world-renowned innovation guru Vijay Govindarajan and digital strategy expert Venkat Venkataraman offer a first-of-its-kind playbook that will help industrial companies combine what they do best-create physical products-with what digitals do best-use algorithms and AI to parse expansive, interconnected datasets-to make strategic connections that would otherwise be impossible.

As a former aerospace scientist, Fortune 500 executive, chief innovation officer of two major companies, inventor and software entrepreneur, David Murray has made a living by coming up with new and innovative ideas. In Borrowing Brilliance he explains the origins and evolution of a business idea by showing you how new ideas are merely the combination of existing ideas.

Entrepreneur and best-selling author of The Lean Startup Eric Ries reveals how entrepreneurial principles can be used by businesses ranging from established companies to early stage startups to grow revenues, drive innovation, and emerge as truly modern organizations poised to take advantage of the enormous opportunities of the 21st century.

In The Innovator's Solution, Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor expand on the idea of disruption, explaining how companies can and should become disruptors themselves. Now with a foreword by innovation expert Scott Anthony, this classic work shows just how timely and relevant these ideas continue to be in today's hyper-accelerated business environment and will help anyone trying to transform their business right now.

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.

Gary Hamel lays out an innovative action plan for any company or individual intent on becoming and staying an industry revolutionary, for years to come. By drawing on the success of "gray haired revolutionaries" like Charles Schwab, Virgin, and GE Capital - companies that are always thinking ahead and growing in new directions - and profiling individuals such as Ken Kutaragi, one of the pioneers behind Sony's PlayStation, Hamel explains how companies can continue to grow, innovate, and achieve success.

Without a strong grasp of performance metrics, a company can have no clear, quantitative indication of its performance improvement. Six Sigma Business Scorecard offers a unique approach to measuring performance. Listeners will learn how to track their improvements in operations and financials - and make critical adjustments if such improvements are not up to expectations - using Six Sigma. This much-needed second edition of Six Sigma Business Scorecard delivers an innovative Execution Map allowing you to implement, reap, and quantify the many advantages of Six Sigma.

The employee experience has dramatically changed, catalyzed by emerging technology, remote-first and hybrid work structures, and rapidly changing business environments. Well-being at work has become an essential strategic priority, while the pressure and demands on teams to deliver results have never been greater. Leaders crave guidance to ignite more connection, innovation, and belonging at work to attract, develop, and retain top talent and discover deeper purpose at work. Creativity is the essential ingredient in today’s workplace to be more effective, joyful, and authentic.

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 promises. It means ensuring that a host of partners - some visible, some hidden - deliver on their promises, too.