Innovation Culture

"Innovation is an act of love—or at least it should be. Always. It is a gesture of empathy, respect, generosity, of one human being’s devotion to another,” writes Mauro Porcini at the beginning of this extraordinary book. It is in part a memoir by one of the world’s leading designers—the first chief design officer at both 3M and Pepsi. But even more, it is a manifesto for a genuine, authentic, and deeply humanistic approach to design, one that aims to create personal and social value first and financial and economic value afterward.

A major work of financial theory and practice with immediate relevance to the rebuilding of the economy, and restoring the promise of equality When the government decides to spend money, it simply creates the necessary funds for itself--as if out of thin air. That's how we pay for interstate...

Starting with the publication of their seminal bestseller, Future Shock, Alvin and Heidi Toffler have given millions of readers new ways to think about personal life in today’s high-speed world with its constantly changing, seemingly random impacts on our businesses, governments, families and...

The Day the Chariot Moved is a tribute to people who make permanent change happen in one lifetime. A unique book on the imperatives for institutional leadership that is relevant across sectors, it humanizes the development agenda for policymakers in the government. It makes change agents from...

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.

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.

From the bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of Genius and Chaos, a bracing new work about the accelerating pace of change in today's world. Most of us suffer some degree of "hurry sickness." a malady that has launched us into the "epoch of the nanosecond," a...

For a period of almost 50 years, from 1945 until the early 1990s, higher education was on an ascent. These “golden years” saw the vast expansion of the opportunity to attend college with the coming of the community college system, the GI Bill, and generous state support that made college affordable for a new generation of upwardly mobile Americans.

You don't have to be a mechanical genius to be an inventor. Anyone can invent - a parent wrestling with a baby sling...a coach frustrated with slick-soled running shoes...an office worker determined to keep the computer cords untangled. Inventing is simply finding clever solutions to everyday challenges. Author and inventor Patricia Nolan-Brown has turned common annoyances into ingenious and money-making products.

In Search of an Adarsh Indian StateIn India, public policies are all around us. Despite this pervasiveness, yeh public sab nahin jaanti hai (the public doesn't know it all).Questions are rarely asked of the Indian State-the institution that makes rules, bends them and punishes others for...

In the wake of economic downturn, foreign competition, spiking oil prices, and even war, American business throughout this decade has been thrust into crisis. To improve their performance, corporations everywhere have adopted a wide range of tools and techniques, yet many continue to struggle. Going Lean points to a better way.

"See for yourself!" was the clarion call of the 1600s. Natural philosophers threw off the yoke of ancient authority, peered at nature with microscopes and telescopes, and ignited the scientific revolution. Artists investigated nature with lenses and created paintings filled with realistic effects of light and shadow. The hub of this optical innovation was the small Dutch city of Delft.

"A moral dilemma gripped Anil K. Gupta when he was invited by the Bangladeshi government to help restructure their agricultural on-farm research sector in 1985. He noticed how the marginalized farmers were being paid poorly for their otherwise unmatched knowledge. The gross injustice of this...

Science and technology have always been central to the plots that make up the world of Bond, and in Superspy Science Kathryn Harkup explores the full range of 007’s exploits and the arms, technologies, tactics and downfalls of his various foes. From the practicalities of building a volcano-based lair, to whether being covered in gold paint really will kill you, and—if your plan is to take over the world—whether it is better to use bacteria, bombs, or poison—this audiobook has all the answers and more.

“A house of wonders itself. . . . Wonderland inspires grins and well-what-d'ya-knows” —The New York Times Book Review From the New York Times–bestselling author of How We Got to Now and Extra Life, a look at the world-changing innovations we made while keeping ourselves...

An award-winning designer and former Design Lead at the iconic innovation firm IDEO teaches how to use small, creative risks to build trust, inspire connection, and supercharge employee engagement. In a world where safety easily becomes stagnation and risk is seen as a threat, Ben Swire's...

But there is a solution. In Rebooting Tech Culture, Whitney explains that the same values at the heart of a culture of innovation—creativity, courage, confidence, curiosity, communication, and community—can also foster a culture that is welcoming to all employees. Drawing on more than fifty interviews with tech executives and a survey of 1,000 people in tech, she shows how these "six Cs" can power real change in technology organizations, creating workplaces where anyone can be successful and where innovation thrives.

Imagine a company where everyone loves to work, where employees feel not just "satisfied" but truly cared for, respected, and energized. Think of the impact this would have on recruitment, retention, customer satisfaction, innovation, and overall performance. Aron Ain, the award-winning CEO of Kronos, a global provider of workforce management and human capital management cloud solutions, believes that anything is possible when people are inspired.

How many presentations on innovation have there been recently? Thousands? Millions? We are experiencing 'innovation fatigue': we feel cheated by the endless rounds of consultants who come into our organizations, deliver conceptual models that don't stick with the realities of business and then leave again. Companies and teams are left feeling more deflated than before, and with not one idea that's impacted the bottom line. Innovation for the Fatigued argues it is worth fighting for the concept and study of innovation in organizations.

The US Army entered World War II unprepared. Lacking Germany's blitzkrieg approach of coordinated armor and air power, the army was organized to fight two wars: one on the ground and one in the air. Previous commentators have blamed Congressional funding and public apathy for the army's unprepared state. David E. Johnson believes instead that the principal causes were internal: army culture and bureaucracy, and their combined impact on the development of weapons and doctrine.