Business Innovation

Tony Fadell led the teams that created the iPod, iPhone and Nest Learning Thermostat and learned enough in 30+ years in Silicon Valley about leadership, design, startups, Apple, Google, decision-making, mentorship, devastating failure and unbelievable success to fill an encyclopedia.

Seeing What's Next is a framework for predicting industry winners and losers. Every day, individuals take action based on how they believe innovation will change industries. Yet these beliefs are largely based on guesswork and incomplete data, and can lead to costly errors in judgment. Internationally renowned innovation expert Clayton M. Christensen and his research partners, Scott D. Anthony and Erik A. Roth, present this guide for predicting outcomes in the evolution of any industry.

If you read (or listen to) nothing else on inspiring and executing innovation, listen to these ten articles. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you innovate effectively.

Mind Tools for Managers helps new and experienced leaders develop the skills they need to be more effective in everything they do. It brings together the 100 most important leadership skills - as voted for by 15,000 managers and professionals worldwide - into a single volume, providing an easy-access solutions manual for people wanting to be the best manager they can be. Each chapter details a related group of skills, plus the tools you need to put ideas into practice.

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 this audiobook suggests is simple: to SIMPLIFY by getting rid of things first rather than continually building on what doesn't work; a form of spring cleaning for your organization.

Four innovation experts from the startup world, large enterprises, nonprofits, and academia come together to reveal the secret of uncovering authentic demand to build successful innovations. Books on innovation mostly focus on how to nurture innovative cultures and brainstorm ideas. The Heart of Innovation is the first popular book to concretely delve into what innovations really are and how to create them.

The history-making development of the Chinese economy has entered a new phase: China is moving aggressively from a strategy of imitation to one of innovation. Driven both by domestic needs and by global ambition, China is establishing itself at the forefront of technological innovation. Western businesses need to prepare for a tidal wave of innovation from China that is about to hit Western markets, and Chinese businesses need to understand the critical importance of innovation in their future.

In Driving Innovation from Within, strategist and advisor Kaihan Krippendorff disproves one of today's biggest business myths to highlight lessons for innovators and leaders. He reveals how many of the modern world's most impactful creations were invented by passionate employee innovators. Distilling more than 150 interviews with internal innovators and leading experts along with insights from the latest research and today's most successful companies Krippendorff lays out a step-by-step playbook to unlock innovation from the inside. He maps the barriers that frustrate efforts to disrupt from within and provides tools to remove them.

Apply the seven universal elements of powerful stories to dramatically improve how you connect with customers and grow your business through social media channels.

Most of us assume our success relies on a network of friends and close contacts. But innovative thinking requires a steady stream of fresh ideas and new possibilities, which strangers are more likely to introduce. Our survival instincts naturally cause us to look upon strangers with suspicion and distrust, but in The Necessity of Strangers, Alan Gregerman offers the provocative idea that engaging with strangers is an opportunity, not a threat, and that engaging with the right strangers is essential to unlocking our real potential.

In this audiobook you will learn how to apply frameworks to building a business, a career - and you. We are living in an era of accelerating disruption - those who can manage the S-curve waves of learning and maxing out will have a competitive advantage. But this is a skill set that needs to be learned. Disrupt Yourself will help people cope with the unpredictability of disruption and use it to their competitive advantage.

What Matters Now is Gary Hamel's impassioned plea to rethink the fundamental assumptions we have about management, the meaning of work, and organizational life. He asks, "What are the fundamental, make-or-break issues that will determine whether your organization thrives or dives in the years ahead?"

Why do some products get more word of mouth than others? Why does some online content go viral? Word of mouth makes products, ideas, and behaviors catch on. It's more influential than advertising and far more effective. Can you create word of mouth for your product or idea? According to Berger, you can. Whether you operate a neighborhood restaurant, a corporation with hundreds of employees, or are running for a local office for the first time, the steps that can help your product or idea become viral are the same.

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.

"Best practices" may be widespread, but that doesn't mean they're effective. In many instances the opposite is true: Best practices can be outdated, harmful, and a hindrance to innovation. In Breaking Bad Habits, Freek Vermeulen, a strategist with a keen eye for the absurd, offers the tools to identify these practices and rid them from your organization. And, most of all, he presents a compelling case for how eliminating popular but outworn ideas, processes, and strategies can create new opportunities for innovation and growth.

IDEO, the widely admired, award-winning design and development firm that brought the world the Apple mouse, Polaroid's I-Zone instant camera, the Palm V, and hundreds of other cutting-edge products and services, reveals its secrets for fostering a culture and process of continuous innovation.

The Art of Making Sh!t Up combines the lessons learned from a personal journey with the teachings derived from years of honing valuable skills through performing and presenting to thousands of people to demonstrate how working together has helped others found and grow several multimillion-dollar companies. By focusing on topics that serve as pain points and detailing the tools and techniques of improv, this audiobook helps people and organizations utilize new skill sets to be more productive, more accepting, and more "all in" to create a stronger teammate and team.

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.

This audiobook was created based on Clayton Christensen's landmark book The Innovator's Dilemma. This was Mr. Christensen's synopsis of his book for the Harvard Business Review. The audio tracks listed here cover the key elements of Mr. Christensen's book. This audiobook emphasizes the Idea in Brief "Does my organization have the right resources, processes, values, and team to innovate?" Then it covers the right structure for your specific type of innovation.

The world's innovation economy is broken. If you have an idea, depending on who you are or where you live, you might never get a shot. A handful of people in a handful of cities are deciding, behind closed doors, which entrepreneurs get a shot to succeed. The determining factor? Potential profit. In The Innovation Blind Spot, venture capitalist Ross Baird demonstrates how to fix the problem by helping us find better ideas, looking at people, places, and industries often overlooked.