A top restaurant’s reputation and success have become so closely bound up with its ability to innovate that a new organizational form, the culinary research and development team, has emerged. The best of these R&D teams continually expand the frontiers of food - they invent a constant stream of new dishes, new cooking processes and methods, and even new ways of experiencing food. How do they achieve this nonstop novelty? And what can culinary research and development teach us about how organizations innovate?

Vaughn Tan opens up the black box of elite culinary R&D to provide essential insights. Drawing on years of unprecedented access to the best and most influential culinary R&D teams in the world, he reveals how they exemplify what he calls the uncertainty mindset. Such a mindset intentionally incorporates uncertainty into organization design rather than simply trying to reduce risk. It changes how organizations hire, set goals, and motivate team members and leads organizations to work in highly unconventional ways. A revelatory look at the R&D kitchen, The Uncertainty Mindset upends conventional wisdom about how to organize for innovation and offers practical insights for businesses trying to become innovative and adaptable. 

The book is published by Columbia University Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

"This book is full of valuable insights for forward-thinking, innovation-minded organizations and teams in any sector." (Nathan Myhrvold, coauthor of Modernist Bread, Modernist Cuisine)

"A real contribution to our understanding of how experts combine artistic creation and business success." (Howard S. Becker, author of Art Worlds)

"This is one of the best books to appear in the last several decades about how to design organizations for continual innovation in high-pressure environments." (Jerry Neumann, founder of Neu Venture Capital)