Career Innovation

How much of innovation is inspiration, and how much is hard work? The answer lies somewhere in the middle, says management thinker Peter Drucker. In this HBR classic from 1985, he argues that innovation is real work that can and should be managed like any other corporate function. Success is more likely to result from the systematic pursuit of opportunities than from a flash of genius. Indeed, most innovative business ideas arise through the methodical analysis of seven areas of opportunity.

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.

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.

Preeminent leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and Being the Boss coauthor Kent Lineback, found among leaders a widely shared, and mistaken, assumption: that a "good" leader in all other respects would also be an effective leader of innovation. The truth is, leading innovation takes a distinctive kind of leadership, one that unleashes and harnesses the "collective genius" of the people in the organization.

In this book, enterprise architecting experts Deborah Nightingale and Donna Rhodes offer a framework for enterprise transformation. Successful transformation, they believe, starts with a holistic approach, taking into consideration all facets of the enterprise and its environment rather than focusing solely on one factor-information technology, for example, or organizational structure. This is architecting the future enterprise: creating a blueprint for what the enterprise will look like after the transformation.

How do you stand out from the pack and not just land the account, but win deals at the prices you want? Lee B. Salz’s previous groundbreaking, best-selling book Sales Differentiation armed salespeople with strategies to differentiate both what they sell and how they sell it. Sell Different! provides a new component of Sales Differentiation strategy to help you outsmart, outmaneuver, and outsell the competition to win more deals at the prices you want. This book provides you with the tools you need to land new accounts and grow existing ones.

How have Japanese companies become world leaders in the automotive and electronics industries, among others? What is the secret of their success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, are the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies.

In this book, Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch reveal the emergence of connected strategies as a new source of competitive advantage. With in-depth examples from companies operating in various industries, Connected Strategy identifies the four pathways - respond-to-desire, curated offering, coach behavior, and automatic execution - for turning episodic interactions into continuous relationships. The authors show how each pathway creates a competitive advantage, then guide you through the critical decisions for creating and implementing your own connected strategies.

Serial entrepreneurs David Kidder and Christina Wallace reveal their revolutionary playbook for igniting growth inside established companies.

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.

If you read (or listen to) nothing else on inspiring and executing innovation, listen to these ten articles. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you innovate effectively.

A big-picture look at how the latest trends in information management and technology are impacting business models and innovation worldwide.... With all of the recent emphasis on "big data", analytics and visualization, and emerging technology architectures such as smartphone networks, social media, and cloud computing, the way we do business is undergoing rapid change. The right business model can create overnight sensations - think of Groupon, the iPad, or Facebook.

What do people and businesses need to know about the realities of innovating in order to develop products successfully? Lorraine Marchand—a seasoned practitioner who has guided Fortune 500 companies and start-ups on developing and launching new ideas—lays out a step-by-step framework for spurring success. She shares her eight laws of innovation, a formula for driving significant and lasting transformation in any organization. Marchand emphasizes the frame of mind needed to spark the innovation process.

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.

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.

50 Business Classics presents the key ideas from classic texts such as My Years with General Motors and Michael Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited to contemporary business lessons from the rise of tech giants like Google, Apple, and Amazon. It contains revealing biographies of luminaries like Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett, as well as lesser-known stories including creation of publishing giant Penguin and Chinese behemoth Alibaba.

Disruption dominates innovation theory and practice. But disruption is destructive—displacing jobs, companies, and even entire industries. Are we missing better, and even bigger, opportunities to innovate and grow? With three decades of research, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne reveal another way to innovate and grow. Beyond Disruption redefines and expands the existing view of innovation by introducing a new approach—nondisruptive creation—that is free from the destructive displacement that happens when innovators set out to disrupt.

Who are the greatest innovators in the world? You're probably thinking Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford - the usual suspects.

This book isn't about them. It's about people who are just as innovative, entrepreneurial, and visionary as the Jobses, Edisons, and Fords of the world, except they're not in Silicon Valley. They're in the street markets of Sao Paulo and Guangzhou, and the rubbish dumps of Lagos. They are pirates, slum dwellers, computer hackers, dissidents, and inner city gang members.

We all know a visionary leader when we see one. They're bold and prophetic and at the same time pragmatic. They don't just promote change - they drive it, while inspiring and mobilizing others to do the same. Visionaries like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos possess a host of innate qualities that make them extraordinary, but what truly sets them apart is their ability to turn vision into action. Here, Innosight's Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz introduce a new way of thinking and managing, called "future-back", that enables any manager to become a practical visionary.

Far from slowing down, change and transformation in business seems to come only at a more and more furious rate. The last ten years alone have seen the introduction of groundbreaking new trends that pose new opportunities and challenges for leaders in all industries.