Social Innovation Ecosystem

This is the first book to present innovation and entrepreneurship as a purposeful and systematic discipline. It clearly explains and analyzes the challenges and opportunities of America's new entrepreneurial economy. Peter Drucker, the most influential and widely-read thinker and writer on modern organizations, gives us a superbly practical book that explains what established businesses, public service institutions, and new ventures have to know, have to learn, and have to do in today's economy and marketplace.

The world is never finished catching up with Vaclav Smil. In his latest and perhaps most digestible book, Invention and Innovation, the prolific author—a favorite of Bill Gates—pens an insightful and fact-filled jaunt through the history of human invention. Impatient with the hype that so often accompanies innovation, Smil offers in this book a clear-eyed corrective to the overpromises that accompany everything from new cures for diseases to AI.

Frustrated by the high costs and difficulty of accepting credit card payments, McKelvey joined his friend Jack Dorsey (the cofounder of Twitter) to launch Square, a startup that would enable small merchants to accept credit card payments on their mobile phones. The Innovation Stack is a thrilling business narrative that's much bigger than the story of Square. It is an irreverent first-person look inside the world of entrepreneurship, and a call to action for all of us to find the entrepreneur within ourselves and identify and fix unsolved problems - one crazy idea at a time.

Permaculture makes the most use of what nature provides for us by using specific design strategies to maximize nature’s gifts, such as food, energy, and shelter. A counter to heavy industrial farming, permaculture is all about conscious planning that caters to the human needs while also respecting and healing the natural environment. At its core, it involves drawing inspiration from nature to build an ecosystem that thrives just like any other. If you want to start practicing permaculture and reap all its benefits, then you need to listen to this audiobook today!

"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.

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.