Innovation Culture

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.

Flat, Fluid, and Fast delivers the tactics and strategies you need to create a disruption-proof company during the talent mobility revolution. It walks you through the entire process, providing expert advice on new ways to draw top talent to your company, implement new training programs, create employee mobility plans, design innovative career paths for staff, leverage contractors and other contingent workers, and operate an adaptable organization for long-term success.

Using real-life practical experiences, serial entrepreneur and thought leader Faisal Hoque teams up with journalist Drake Baer to provide a personal and professional playbook that is part philosophy, part business, and part history. Everything Connects offers the wisdom of 2,500-year-old Eastern philosophies and the interconnected insights of Leonardo da Vinci. Couple that with Fortune 100 corporate cross pollination for creativity and startup thinking for how to adapt with ease, and you'll quickly discover that everything connects.

From the New York Times best-selling author of How We Got to Now and Extra Life, a look at the world-changing innovations we made while keeping ourselves entertained. This history of popular entertainment takes a long-zoom approach, contending that the pursuit of novelty and wonder is a powerful driver of world-shaping technological change. Steven Johnson argues that, throughout history, the cutting edge of innovation lies wherever people are working the hardest to keep themselves and others amused.

Bridging the gap between tech mania and the experience of being inside the human body, Dawn of the New Everything is a look at what it means to be human at a moment of unprecedented technological possibility. Through a fascinating look back over his life in technology, Jaron Lanier, an interdisciplinary scientist and father of the term virtual reality, exposes VR's ability to illuminate and amplify our understanding of our species and gives listeners a new perspective on how the brain and body connect to the world.

Since the Gutenberg Bible first went on sale in 1455, printing has been viewed as one of the highest achievements of human innovation. But the march of progress hasn't been smooth; downright bizarre is more like it. Printer's Error chronicles some of the strangest and most humorous episodes in the history of Western printing. Take, for example, the Gutenberg Bible. While the book is regarded as the first printed work in the Western world, Gutenberg's name doesn't appear anywhere on it.

Innovation starts with a problem whose solution sets in motion all kinds of unexpected discoveries. That's why you can draw a line from pendulums to punching the clock at a factory, from ice blocks to summer movie blockbusters, from clean water to computer chips. In the lively storytelling style that has made him a popular, best-selling author Steven Johnson looks at how accidental genius, brilliant mistakes, and unintended consequences shape the way we live in the modern world.

Life innovates constantly, producing perfectly adapted species—but there's a catch. Many animals and plants eke out seemingly unremarkable lives. Passive, constrained, modest, threatened. Then, in a blink of evolutionary time, they flourish spectacularly. Once we start to look, these 'sleeping beauties' crop up everywhere. But why? Looking at the book of life, from apex predators to keystone crops, and informed by his own cutting-edge experiments, renowned scientist Andreas Wagner demonstrates that innovations can come frequently and cheaply to nature, well before they are needed.

How did the iPhone transform our world and turn Apple into the most valuable company ever? Veteran technology journalist Brian Merchant reveals the inside story you won't hear from Cupertino - based on his exclusive interviews with the engineers, inventors, and developers who guided every stage of the iPhone's creation. This deep dive takes you from inside One Infinite Loop to 19th century France to WWII America, from the driest place on earth to a Kenyan pit of toxic e-waste, and even deep inside Shenzhen's notorious "suicide factories".

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.

The definitive history of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon agency that has quietly shaped war and technology for nearly 60 years. Founded in 1958 in response to the launch of Sputnik, the agency's original mission was to create "the unimagined weapons of the future". Over the decades, DARPA has been responsible for countless inventions and technologies that extend well beyond military technology.

A detailed look into ancient advanced technology, science, and medicine - some of which has yet to be reproduced today.

Erno Rubik was a child when he first became obsessed with puzzles of all kinds. "Puzzles", he writes, "bring out important qualities in each of us: concentration, curiosity, a sense of play, the eagerness to discover a solution". To Rubik, puzzles aren't just games - they're creativity machines. He encourages us to embrace our inner curiosity and find the puzzles that surround us in our everyday lives. "If you are determined, you will solve them", he writes. Rubik's own puzzle, the Cube, has been solved by millions worldwide for more than 40 years....

Tom Kelley, author of The Art of Innovation and the general manager of IDEO, the world-famous design firm, illuminates the strategies IDEO used to beat the devil's advocate and drive creativity throughout the organization.

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.

Patents don't have to be a dry and boring subject, and inventors, investors, and business people may (and should) enjoy using them to their advantage. However, to empower the general public to use the patent system to its fullest extent, the need remains for a book that introduces important patent concepts in a humanly understandable fashion, with down-to-earth, practical advice that, more importantly, is not boring, as many patent books unavoidably are to readers who are not patent practitioners.

In his doctoral research, author Yoram Solomon showed that the factors affecting creativity and productivity the most could be summed up with one word - culture. He published his findings in his book Un-Kill Creativity: How Corporate America Can Out-Innovate Startups. However, he also found that employees play a major role in creating the right culture and should not put the burden solely on management.

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.

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.

Practical guide showing inventors how to develop, prototype, protect, and market their inventions. Bob is an engineer with over 25 years experience developing and marketing products. He used his corporate and entrepreneurial experience to develop this step-by-step guide to help fellow inventors develop their products using a "boot strapping" approach. This helps inventors to successfully develop and market their inventions without breaking the bank.