Career Innovation

The pressure to generate big ideas can feel overwhelming. We know that bold innovations are critical in these disruptive and competitive times, but when it comes to breakthrough thinking, we often freeze up. Instead of shooting for a $10-billion payday or a Nobel Prize, the most prolific innovators focus on Big Little Breakthroughs - small creative acts that unlock massive rewards over time. By cultivating daily micro-innovations, individuals and organizations are better equipped to tackle tough challenges and seize transformational opportunities.

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.

Innovating Innovation! answers the trillion-dollar question, “What can large companies do to innovate as easily as their disruptive startup competitors?” Corporate executives will learn how they can catch up and unlock the same quick-to-market innovations startups use to rapidly disrupt whole industries.

With Expand: Stretching the Future By Design, authors Jens Martin Skibsted, a multiple-award-winning designer, entrepreneur, and design philosopher, and Christian Bason, political scientist and CEO of the Danish Design Centre, take listeners beyond "design thinking" to challenge current habits and carve out new space for more sustainable innovation. From transforming the ways we do business and reimagining health care, to creating planet-restoring housing and humanizing our digital lives in an age of AI, Expand explores how expansive thinking across six key areas.

Through the eyes of an inventor of new markets, Good Derivatives: A Story of Financial and Environmental Innovation tells the story of how financial innovation - a concept that is misunderstood and under attack - has been a positive force in the last four decades. If properly designed and regulated, these “good derivatives” can open vast possibilities to address a variety of global problems. Filled with provocative ideas and valuable lessons, this book will provide both an insightful interpretation of the last 40 years in capital and environmental markets.

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.

Throughout this book, Francisco Gonzalez introduces us to innovators who are succeeding in today’s economy despite the increasing challenges to achieving the American Dream. Join Francisco’s journey across America to discover the people and places that taught him the major characteristics most entrepreneurs share. Whether or not you ever want to start your own business, the stories in this volume will help you learn how to build an entrepreneurial mindset, conquer the obstacles that stand in your way, and be emboldened to craft and pursue your American Dream.

Highly acclaimed author, trainer, and presenter Paul Sloane demonstrates how the lateral leader develops the vision, culture, and processes that transform a regular business into an innovation hothouse. With a lively, energetic and practical approach, The Leader's Guide to Lateral Thinking Skills will teach you dynamic, up-to-date techniques to unleash the creative energies of your people and reveal how to put the techniques to work immediately.

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.

Confronting Reality will change the way you think about and run your business. It is the first book that shows how to connect the big picture of the new era of business with the nitty-gritty of what to do about it.

Chaotic Change is designed to be a comprehensive guide for leaders, innovators, and change-makers navigating the complexities of the modern business landscape. Through personal anecdotes, case studies, and practical strategies, this book provides a roadmap for managing chaotic change—a process that drives and sustains innovation. From grasping the dynamics of strategic excellence to fostering a culture of happiness and clarity within organizations, each section builds on the next, offering a holistic approach to change management.

Partnership marketing is not new; it has existed in many different forms, and under many different names (such as affiliate marketing) for decades. However, thanks to transformative changes in enabling technology and pricing models, as well as a change in both supply and demand, partnership marketing now exists in a more automated, scalable form that few companies have fully leveraged to date. Moving to Outcomes will unlock the keys and show readers how to do so for themselves.

Innovation requires solving big problems from a new perspective, but many struggle to successfully innovate in their work or personal life when faced with a problem that requires innovative thinking. Author and researcher April Bell has zeroed in on the power of empathy and the ability to embrace risk when solving big problems in the unknown. In her book, The Fire Starter: Igniting Innovation with Empathy, Bell combines engaging personal stories with research to provide listeners with a simple framework helping them connect to greater human truths to solve big problems.

In Turning the Giant, John Berra shares his amazing life's journey that took him from being a shy, uncertain university student to becoming the Chairman of Emerson Process Management. As someone who was voted into the Process Automation Hall of Fame, Berra writes from a place of authority and conviction. Because he has faced countless giants along his path, he knows what it takes to turn 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 the world of work, the single greatest asset of successful individuals, teams, and organizations is their mindset - what happens in between their ears. It's not the corporate strategy, the sales compensation plan, or the market segments they're pursuing. It is what each leader, team member, and employee chooses to focus on, to believe, and to create for themselves and others.

Présentation du cours: "La créativité est contagieuse, faites-la tourner", disait Einstein qui à force de s'imaginer voyageant sur un photon a découvert la relativité. Certes, passer du "pourquoi ?" au "pourquoi pas ?" procure suffisamment de jubilation pour que chacun contamine son entourage sans inutiles scrupules. Mais cela n'est rien encore. Philippe Verhaeghe nous gratifie aussi du "comment ?". La créativité est d'abord affaire de méthode. La créativité est ensuite le ressort de l'innovation.

"Si j'avais demandé à mes clients ce qu'ils voulaient, ils m’auraient répondu 'des chevaux plus rapides' ", disait Henry Ford. Comme quoi, on ne doit pas aborder son marché à partir de clichés comme l'a peut-être fait Kodak. La compétition mondiale avait pour objet la détention des capitaux. Mais aujourd'hui c'est plutôt la culture des idées qui permet de se développer. Il s'agit de générer régulièrement des idées rupturistes.

The only way to secure competitive advantage is to ensure that creative thinking is driving your organization. It will enable workplace satisfaction, boost performance, and encourage new ideas throughout teams. To tackle our uncertain environment - and to win in the world of future business - we all need to get serious about creativity and the potential it can unleash. The authors of Belonging have now written A Year of Creativity, which will make creativity accessible to everyone.

The Mistakes That Make Us is a must-listen for those seeking to improve their organizations, with benefits such as lower turnover, more innovation, and better performance. Whether you're a startup founder or an aspiring leader, this book will inspire you to lead with kindness, humility, and the belief that learning from mistakes can make things right.