Innovation Culture

Design offers so much more than an aesthetically pleasing logo or banner, a beautification add-on after the heavy lifting. In Reimagining Design, Kevin Bethune shows how design provides a unique angle on problem-solving—how it can be leveraged strategically to cultivate innovation and anchor multidisciplinary teamwork. As he does so, he describes his journey as a Black professional through corporate America, revealing the power of transformative design, multidisciplinary leaps, and diversity.

Every day major headlines tell the story of a new and better American marketplace. Established corporations have begun reevaluating the quality of their products, the ethics of their supply chains, and how they can give back by donating portions of their profits to meaningful causes. Meanwhile millions of entrepreneurs who want a more responsible and compassionate marketplace have launched a new breed of socially focused business models.

Are you drowning in endless tasks? Stuck using outdated tools that make your workday drag on forever? Does the mere mention of AI make you feel like you're lost in a sci-fi thriller you don't understand? Take a deep breath. You don't have to be a tech guru to harness the game-changing powers of AI and ChatGPT. You're just one listen away from demolishing the barriers that prevent you from unlocking a wealth of new skills and opportunities.

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.

Bina Venkataraman sees the way forward. A journalist and former adviser in the Obama White House, she helped communities and businesses prepare for climate change, and she learned firsthand why people don’t think ahead - and what can be done to change that. In The Optimist’s Telescope, she draws from stories she has reported around the world and new research in biology, psychology, and economics to explain how we can make decisions that benefit us over time.

The digital revolution has transformed the world of media, upending centuries-old companies and business models. Now, it is restructuring every business, every job, and every sector of society. Yet the biggest changes are still ahead. To survive, every industry and organization will have to transform itself in multiple ways. O'Reilly explores what the next economy will mean for the world and every aspect of our lives - and what we can do to shape it.

Award-winning author William Rosen tells the story of the men responsible for the Industrial Revolution and the machine that drove it: the steam engine.

A father cleans up after his toddler and imagines a cup that won't spill. An engineer watches people using walkie-talkies and has an idea. A doctor figures out how to deliver patients to the operating room before they die. By studying inventions like these - the sippy cup, the cell phone, and an ingenious hospital bed - we can learn how people imagine their way around "impossible" problems to discover groundbreaking answers.

In the new edition of this fascinating book, a book that has appeared on MSNBC, CNBC, Slashdot.org, Lifehacker.com and in the New York Times, best-selling author Scott Berkun pulls the best lessons from the history of innovation, including the recent software and web age, to reveal powerful and surprising truths about how ideas become successful innovations - truths people can easily apply to the challenges of today.

Soon after its debut at the time of the Civil War, the Gatling gun changed the nature of warfare and the course of world history. Discharging 200 shots per minute with alarming accuracy, the world's first machine gun became vitally important to protecting and expanding America's overseas interests.

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.

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.

A self-professed "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist", the inventor Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was undoubtedly a visionary. Fuller's creations often bordered on the realm of science fiction, ranging from the freestanding geodesic dome to the three-wheel Dymaxion car to a bathroom requiring neither plumbing nor sewage. Yet in spite of his brilliant mind and lifelong devotion to serving mankind, Fuller's expansive ideas were often dismissed, and have faded from public memory since his death.

Thou Shalt Innovate profiles wondrous Israeli innovations that are collectively changing the lives of billions of people around the world, and explores why Israeli innovators of all faiths feel compelled to make the world better. This is the story of how Israelis are helping to feed the hungry, cure the sick, protect the defenseless, and make the desert bloom. Israel is playing a disproportionate role in helping solve some of the world's biggest challenges by tapping into the nation's soul: the spirit of tikkun olam - the Jewish concept of repairing the world.

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.

In Eat, Sleep, Innovate, innovation expert Scott Anthony and his impressive team of coauthors use groundbreaking research in behavioral science to provide a first-of-its-kind playbook for empowering individuals and teams to be their most curious and creative - every single day.

You don't have to be a mechanical genius to be an inventor. Anyone can invent - a parent wrestling with a baby sling...a coach frustrated with slick-soled running shoes...an office worker determined to keep the computer cords untangled. Inventing is simply finding clever solutions to everyday challenges. Author and inventor Patricia Nolan-Brown has turned common annoyances into ingenious and money-making products.

Michael Colburn is an inventor. He wasn't always, but he made himself into one and realized a powerful truth: Inventing is a skill anyone can master. Over the last four decades, he has created inventions and built businesses and partnerships worth millions of dollars based on his inventions. Invent, Innovate, and Prosper is a practical handbook for inventing based on Michael's decades of work as a successful inventor. He shares his step-by-step system for launching profitable inventions, along with the surprising real-life lessons that helped him thrive.

In Quick and Nimble, Adam Bryant draws on interviews with more than 200 CEOs to offer business leaders the wisdom and guidance to move an organization faster, to be quick and nimble, and to rekindle the whatever-it-takes collective spark of a start-up, all with the goal of innovating and thriving in a relentlessly challenging global economy. By analyzing the lessons that these leaders have shared in his regular "Corner Office" feature in The New York Times, Bryant has identified the biggest drivers of corporate culture, bringing them to life with real-world examples that reflect this hard-earned wisdom.

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.