Business Innovation

Four innovation experts from the startup world, large enterprises, nonprofits, and academia come together to reveal the secret of uncovering authentic demand to build successful innovations. Books on innovation mostly focus on how to nurture innovative cultures and brainstorm ideas. The Heart of Innovation is the first popular book to concretely delve into what innovations really are and how to create them.

In 2006, John Warren and John Thompson led Marines into combat in the world’s most dangerous city: Ramadi, Iraq. But when they got home, employers didn’t understand what they had to offer. Undeterred, they founded their own specialty mortgage company, growing it from scratch into a national powerhouse over the course of a decade.

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.

Written by the executive who designed and implemented it, the neuroscientist who helped make it work, and the academic who explains why it works and how to do it, Leading Transformation introduces an innovative yet proven process for creating breakthrough change.

Brick by Brick takes you inside the LEGO you've never seen. By following the teams that are inventing some of the world's best-loved toys, it spotlights the company's disciplined approach to harnessing creativity and recounts one of the most remarkable business transformations in recent memory.

Whether people want more government or less, everyone wants an efficient government. Traditional thinking is that this requires a government to be run more like a business. But a government is not a business, and this approach merely replaces old problems with new ones. In their six-year, five-country study of 77 government organizations—ranging from small departments to entire states—Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder found that the predominant private-sector approaches to improvement don’t work well in the public sector.

When traditional approaches are inadequate or resisted, advanced leadership skills are essential. In this book, Kanter shows how people everywhere can unleash their creativity and entrepreneurial adroitness to mobilize partners across challenging cultural, social, and political situations and innovate for a brighter future.

Our changing world demands creative thinkers and collaborative problem solvers, but too often, schools stifle growth and discovery in favor of getting through the curriculum or preparing for "the test." Learning opportunities and teaching methods must evolve to match the learner's needs....

Tamara Ghandour, author, podcaster, keynote speaker and founder of innovation training company LaunchStreet, used to believe that innovation was the domain of a select few, exclusive to certain industries or relegated to a specific job role. But, as Tamara discovered in her 25 years of work and research, everybody has the capacity to innovate. It's a person's unique innovation style, which can be assessed and channelled, that can transform inertia into innovation.

From years of research and practical experience as a consultant, Jeff DeGraff has learned that when it comes to any innovation initiative, disharmony is crucial. We innovate when we disrupt, and we first have to disrupt each other.

Nearly all of today’s major innovation workshops and programs call on organizations to drive innovation. What they miss is that innovation comes from the personal creativity of individuals. And creativity doesn’t require an advanced education or technical skills. All employees can be creative. Often, all they lack is a fitting mindset and the right skills.

Published in more than two dozen countries, How to Change the World has become a bible for the field of social entrepreneurship. It tells the stories of people building innovative and pattern-changing solutions to social and economic problems.

Who’s going to write the next chapter in the saga of American business? Who’s going to chronicle the best way to compete, the new way to win? That’s the mission of Mavericks at Work, a book that profiles a network of rebels who are creating a new business model that makes use of fresh principles and captures what it means to be a state-of-the-art organization. Including such pioneering companies as ING Direct, Southwest Airlines, Pixar, HBO, Anthropologie, Craigslist, Netflix, and Commerce Bank, this book is nothing short of a lively new intellectual agenda for business.

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.

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.

A lot of businesspeople talk about innovation, but few companies have achieved the level of truly transformative innovation as brilliantly - or as famously - as the legendary Mayo Clinic. Introducing Think Big, Start Small, Move Fast, the first innovation guide based on the proven, decade-long program that's made Mayo Clinic one of the most respected and successful organizations in the world.

Knowledge workers are the innovators, designers and marketers of your company's products and services. They are the highly paid strategists, executives, and IT specialists whose ideas and expertise fuel your success. But are they delivering their best performance?

When faced with new challenges, it’s easy to feel our solutions need to be equally unprecedented. We think we need a revolution. But what if this is a big mistake? In Evolutionary Ideas, Sam Tatam shows how behavioral science and evolutionary psychology can help us solve tomorrow’s challenges, not by divining something the world has never seen, but by borrowing from yesterday’s solutions–often in the most unexpected ways.

As leaders or parents (or both), navigating difficult conversations is part of our job description. How do we keep calm and achieve a productive outcome, all while keeping our relationships intact? The secret is curiosity. It is the innovation-driving, emotion-calming skill that comes so naturally to us as kids but gets buried so easily beneath our busy, multitasking lifestyles as adults. The good news is that we just have to relearn what we already know!

In The Innovator's Solution, Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor expand on the idea of disruption, explaining how companies can and should become disruptors themselves. Now with a foreword by innovation expert Scott Anthony, this classic work shows just how timely and relevant these ideas continue to be in today's hyper-accelerated business environment and will help anyone trying to transform their business right now.