Business Innovation

There once was a small town and school in Oregon with a dream that began afresh with an eighth-grader who asked her parents, “Why can't we just have a real track?” As it happened, the community and school had been talking about creating an athletic complex for over 25 years, without even approaching to the starting line. Michael Bergmann and IncubatorU™ showed up to help the town realize their vision and embrace this young girl’s dream. They built a framework using IncubatorU’s 5-Step Methodology.

In The Wise Company, legendary management experts Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi highlight how various companies have confronted the challenge of rapid change. The key: a relentless self-renewal process where companies realize the future they envision, rather than only responding to changes in the environment.

It’s not the iPhone, but VC, that is Silicon Valley’s greatest export—it’s the key ingredient of innovation and provides the toolkit for inventors and start-up founders around the world to become powerful, multibillion-dollar companies.

John O’Maley’s career in the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry is anything but conventional. From his early career (West Point, Ranger, Captain) navigating complex military supply chains to leading forward-thinking marketing teams (P&G), he has always approached the industry’s challenges with a unique lens. Now, with AI revolutionizing the very core of how CPG brands operate, O’Maley offers an insider’s perspective spanning four decades that is both timely and transformative.

Are you ready to tap into the hidden potential within your organization? Empowering Intrapreneurship is your guide to fostering innovation, motivation, and proactive leadership, especially in manufacturing environments.

In Grow from Within, two leading scholars from the Kellogg School of Management explain how your company can discover the right approach to corporate entrepreneurship and make it profitable. Taking innovation to the next level, corporate entrepreneurship is the process of building new businesses within an established organization - new businesses that are distinct from the core company but that leverage some of its most powerful assets.

Ninja Future is an essential listen for businesses and individuals striving to remain competitive in a rapidly evolving world: Gary Shapiro, the president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, casts his eye toward the future, charting how the innovative technologies of today will transform not only the way business is done, but society itself.

Almost every major company today has made innovation its number one priority. Yet fewer than one in four executives believe their organizations are effective innovators. The pressure to innovate and the price paid for failure keeps rising while most companies haven't progressed at all. They are still using the same antiquated techniques pioneered decades ago. This is why some of the biggest corporations in the world manage to lose entire markets to start-ups they've never heard of.

Rediscover and liberate your creative genius. The challenge facing today's business leaders is how to transform the tension between running the businesses of today and innovating to build the businesses of tomorrow - how to change and innovate while dealing with the relentless and rapid changes buffeting us daily.

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.

Create products and services your consumers can't pass up - without the high cost of development.

Musicians may just hold the keys to innovation in business. They don’t think like we do, and in the creative process, they don’t act like we do. It’s no coincidence that some of the world’s most respected creators are also entrepreneurs. In Two Beats Ahead, Panos A. Panay, senior vice president for strategy at Berklee College of Music, and R. Michael Hendrix, global design director at IDEO, interview some of the nation’s top musicians and business leaders about how they approach innovation differently.

The nature of services in society and the economy is wide-ranging and complex, and the management of services and their innovation provokes a number challenges for practitioners, professionals, and academics. This book provides a range of perspectives on understanding, managing, and reconceptualizing service by bringing together contributions from leading figures in service research, to make a timely and significant multi-disciplinary contribution to the theory and practice of service management.

Big Bang Disruptions are new products and services that enter the market better and cheaper than established products, seemingly overnight. Larry Downes and Paul F. Nunes offer critical insights and strategies companies are using not just to protect themselves but to create and appropriate disruptive innovations for themselves. The authors detail the four stages of big bang innovation and show leaders how to see disruptions headed their way - and take action before it’s too late.

Here's how you can increase and sustain organic revenue and profit growth, whether you're running an entire company or in your first management job. Over the past seven years, Procter & Gamble has tripled profits; improved organic revenue growth, cash flow, and operating margins; and averaged earnings per share growth of 12 percent. Through eye-opening stories, A. G. Lafley and Ram Charan show how P&G and companies such as Honeywell, Nokia, LEGO, GE, HP, and DuPont have become game-changers.

Every city in America wants to become a tech hub, yet so few succeed—and that’s the problem. Tech jobs, venture capital, and R&D are concentrated in a handful of big coastal cities, while the broad middle of the country is left out. But to thrive in the twenty-first century, cities must create innovation economies of their own and grow in more inclusive ways. In January 2020, Nicholas Lalla founded Tulsa Innovation Labs to help Tulsa, Oklahoma transition from its oil and gas legacy to tech. Lalla’s organization would go on to build the first tech-led economic development strategy.

In this compelling journey through twenty-six countries, Simon Mundy traces how the struggle to respond to the climate crisis is rapidly reshaping the modern world–shattering communities, shaking global business and propelling waves of cutting-edge innovation. Telling unforgettable human stories, meeting scientists and business tycoons, activists and political leaders, this is an account of disaster and survival, of frantic adaptation and groundbreaking innovation, of hope, and of the forces that will define our future.

In recent years, dreams about our technological future have soured as digital platforms have undermined privacy, eroded labor rights, and weakened democratic discourse. In light of the negative consequences of innovation, some blame harmful algorithms or greedy CEOs. Behind the Startup focuses instead on the role of capital and the influence of financiers. Drawing on nineteen months of participant-observation research inside a successful Silicon Valley startup, this book examines how the company was organized to meet the needs of the venture capital investors who funded it.

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.

When I was growing up, I always thought there were only two ways to get rich. Number one: You were born rich. Number two: Some family member left you a bunch of money when they kicked the bucket. As much as people love to talk up the American dream, I grew up inside the American reality - raised inside a trailer in New Jersey, born to a 14-year-old mother. But now, things are a little different. I've done lots of cool things with my life, but most people know me as "the ab roller guy".