Social Innovation

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.

From two leading experts in education and entrepreneurship, an urgent call for the radical reimagining of American education so that we better equip students for the realities of the 21st-century economy.

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.

Analogies are far more complex than their SAT stereotype and lie at the very core of human cognition and creativity. Once we become aware of this, we start seeing them everywhere - in ads, apps, political debates, legal arguments, logos, and euphemisms, to name just a few. At their very best, analogies inspire new ways of thinking, enable invention, and motivate people to action. Unfortunately, not every analogy that rings true is true. That's why, at their worst, analogies can deceive, manipulate, or mislead us into disaster.

No matter the conversation, detecting honesty and persuading others to be honest are some of the most valuable skills you can learn. With these skills, you can master your daily conversations and interactions with others. The Strategic Interviewing Skills and Competencies (SISCO) Method will help you see the full picture, have all the facts, and make effective decisions. Former Navy interrogator, Lena Sisco, created this method during challenging investigative and information-gathering interviews. Her 5-step program focuses human-to-human interaction.

Governments worldwide struggle to remove policy deadlocks and enact much-needed reforms in organizational structure and public services. This book explores collaborative innovation as a way for public and private stakeholders to break the impasse. Torfing draws on his own pioneering work in Europe as well as examples from the UnS and Australia to construct a cross-disciplinary framework for studying collaborative innovation.

In The Politics Industry, Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter ingeniously apply the tools of business analysis - and Porter's distinctive Five Forces framework - to show how the political system functions just as every other competitive industry does, and how the duopoly has led to the devastating outcomes we see today. Using this competition lens, Gehl and Porter identify the most powerful lever for change - a strategy comprised of a clear set of choices in two key areas: how our elections work and how we make our laws.

The president of the US is not a tax avoider because he is an especially fraudulent financier; he's a tax avoider because he is a wealthy man in a system premised on such deceit. Finance is an industry of sabotage. This book is a brilliant, intellectual detective story that traces the origins of financial sabotage, starting with the work of a prescient American economist who saw the capacity for banks and businesses to dissemble and profit as early as the 1920s.

Our digestive system plays an unusual role in mind/body health in that unlike most of the body other than the brain and spinal cord, it contains the largest concentration of brain-like cells and neurotransmitters. The “trust your gut” concept is just as important as trusting your brain. This convenient, short-listen audiobook explores how the brain in your head and the brain in your gut can work together to improve your health.

Everything you've been told about being green is wrong. The quest for a breakthrough battery or a 100-mpg car is a dangerous fantasy. We are consumers, and we like to consume greenly and efficiently. But David Owen argues that our best intentions are still at cross-purposes to our true goal: living sustainably while caring for our environment and the future of the planet. Efficiency, once considered the holy grail of our environmental problems, turns out to be part of the problem - we have little trouble turning increases in efficiency into increases in consumption.

Firebrand conservative columnist, commentator, Internet entrepreneur, and number-one New York Times best-selling author Michelle Malkin tells the fascinating, little-known stories of the inventors who have contributed to American exceptionalism and technological progress.

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.

Niccolò Machiavelli famously wrote, "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." That's what this book is about - innovation far more audacious than a new way to find a restaurant or a smart phone you can wear on your wrist. Harvard professor Amy Edmondson and journalist Susan Salter Reynolds explore how to bring into being systems that transform human experience and make the world more livable and sustainable.

As human activity and environmental change come to be increasingly recognized as intertwined phenomena on a rapidly urbanizing planet, the field of urban ecology has risen to offer useful ways of thinking about coupled human and natural systems. On the forefront of this discipline is Marina Alberti, whose innovative work offers a conceptual framework for uncovering fundamental laws that govern the complexity and resilience of cities, which she sees as key to understanding and responding to planetary change and the evolution of Earth.

Drawing on narratives from hundreds of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous individuals, Ebony Omotola McGee examines the experiences of underrepresented racially minoritized students and faculty members who have succeeded in STEM.

Recognizing the power of the new and trying to understand and promote the conditions that make it possible, the Greeks were the first to write about innovation and even the first to record a word for forging something new. In short, the Greeks "invented" innovation itself - and they still have a great deal to teach us about it. How to Innovate is an engaging introduction to key ideas about - and examples of - innovation and creative thinking from ancient Greece. Armand D'Angour provides lively new translations of selections from Aristotle, Diodorus, and Athenaeus.

In Hacking School: Five Strategies to Link Learning to Life, Dr. Corbin invites you to join her journey to reshape K-12 education. She presents five key strategies: Student Agency, Culturally Relevant Education, Mastery Learning, Transdisciplinary Teaching, and Problem-Based Learning. These frameworks empower educators and make learning meaningful for students.

In this book, Nobel Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps draws on a lifetime of thinking to make a sweeping new argument about what makes nations prosper--and why the sources of that prosperity are under threat today. Why did prosperity explode in some nations between the 1820s and 1960s, creating not just unprecedented material wealth but "flourishing"--meaningful work, self-expression, and personal growth for more people than ever before?

Drawing on the knowledge and experience of working with hundreds the world's top social change leaders in all fields, Beverly Schwartz presents a model for change based on five proven principles that any individual leader or organization can apply to bring about deep, lasting, and systematic change. Rippling shows how to activate the type of change that is needed to address the critical challenges that threaten to destroy the foundations of our society and planet in these increasingly turbulent times.

Art and science are famous opposites. Contemporary innovation mostly keeps them far apart. But in this book, David Edwards, world-renowned inventor; Harvard professor of the practice of idea translation; creator of breathable insulin, edible food packaging, and digital scents, reveals that the secret to creating very new things of lasting benefit, including innovations we will need to sustain human life on the planet, lies in perceiving art and science as one.