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Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing
By Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper
MIT Sloan School of Management vets Gloor and Cooper strip "cool" of its cool in this introductory lesson to trendspotting. Beginning with a definition of "cool" that includes "excellent," "fun" and "makes the world a better place, in some way," the authors show how the excellent, fun iPod is truly cool because it's "keeping kids out of trouble." [Read an interview with Peter Gloor]
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Innovation to the Core: A Blueprint for Transforming the Way Your Company Innovates
By Peter Skarzynski and Rowan Gibson
If you're like most business leaders, innovation now tops your corporate agenda. But despite all the talk and excitement about the importance of innovation, managers have so far found scant help for innovating in a systematic way that fuels consistent growth and sustained success. The book shows how companies of every stripe have overcome the barriers to successful, profitable innovation.
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Think!: Why Crucial Decisions Can't Be Made in the Blink of an Eye
By Michael LeGault
Many people have interpreted Think as a political book. To the extent that it is an analysis of the cultural and social reasons for the decline in critical thinking in America, and to the extent that culture is inextricably connected to politics, then yes, Think! is political. The objective is to affect a grassroots (not top down) change in the way we think and solve problems. [Read an interview with Michael LeGault]
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Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature
By Janine M. Benyus
Innovations, whether in farming, composite science, or computing, are a product of human creativity. Science writer Benyus uses these subjects and others to demonstrate how nature's solutions to situations have been the creative jumping-off points for individuals seeking solutions, developing, or simply revitalizing processes or products.
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The Innovative Leader: How to Inspire Your Team and Drive Creativity
By Paul Sloan
The Innovative Leader stresses the importance of innovation and creativity in modern business to help organizations secure competitive advantage over rivals. Numerous international examples illustrate how organizations such as Virgin, Body Shop, Disney, and 3M have benefited from this approach, encouraging excellence and entrepreneurship through challenging goals that keep employees motivated and engaged.
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Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm
Open Innovation describes an emergent model of innovation in which firms draw on research and development that may lie outside their own boundaries. In some cases, such as open source software, this research and development can take place in a non-proprietary manner. Henry Chesbrough and his collaborators investigate this phenomenon, linking the practice of innovation to the established body of innovation research, showing what's new and what's familiar in the process.
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101 Creative Problem Solving Techniques: The Handbook of New Ideas for Business
This book will enhance your thinking process in terms of exercising your own creativity to solve business problems. The tools in this book can be used to bring out your own originality and expressiveness in seeking solutions. I liked the way the author James M. Higgins, gave real life examples of Giant Corporations that have used one or more of these problem-solving techniques.
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The Myths of Innovation
In The Myths of Innovation, bestselling author Scott Berkun takes a careful look at innovation history, including the software and Internet Age, to reveal how ideas truly become successful innovations-truths that people can apply to today's challenges. Using dozens of examples from the history of technology, business, and the arts, you'll learn how to convert the knowledge you have into ideas that can change the world. [Read an interview with Scott Berkun]
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Collaborative Entrepreneurship: How Communities of Networked Firms Use Continuous Innovation to Create Economic Wealth
Collaborative Entrepreneurship discusses a revolutionary new competitive strategy of continuous innovation that fulfills the need for efficient provision of a constant stream of new products, services, and markets. The book explains how firms can build a collaborative community within which they can freely share in the creation of wealth through innovation with the assurance that the wealth they create will be equitably distributed.
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The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
"The best way to understand the dramatic transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life," writes Malcolm Gladwell, "is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do." [Read an interview with Malcolm Gladwell]
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Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity And the New Science of Ideas
Richard Ogle boldly outlines "a new science of ideas", the key to which resides in what he calls "idea-spaces," a set of nodes in a network of people (and their ideas) that cohere and take on a distinctive set of characteristics leading to the generation of breakthrough ideas. These spaces are governed by nine laws--illuminated in individual chapters with fascinating stories of dramatic breakthroughs in science, business, and art. [Read an inteview with Richard Ogle]
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Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer
Parsing the Turing Test is a landmark exploration of both the philosophical and methodological issues surrounding the search for true artificial intelligence. Will computers and robots ever think and communicate the way humans do? When a computer crosses the threshold into self-consciousness, will it immediately jump into the Internet and create a World Mind?
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Democratizing Innovation
Users increasingly can develop their own new products and services. In Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel looks closely at this emerging system of user-centered innovation. He explains why and when users find it profitable to develop new products and services for themselves, and why it often pays users to reveal their innovations freely for the use of all. [Read an interview with Dr. Eric von Hippel]
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Think Naked: Childlike Brilliance in the Rough Adult World
The fact is that 98 percent of us are geniuses early in life, and almost all of us lose our genius. Is it lost forever? No. Champions of creative thinking, Marco Marsan and Peter Lloyd will reunite you with your childhood creativity, your unbridled curiosity, and your exuberance for life.
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Innovation Nation: How America Is Losing Its Innovation Edge, Why It Matters, and What We Can Do to Get It Back
Alarmed by the lack of innovation in the United States today, former Harvard Business School professor and current consultant John Kao diagnoses the situation, describes best practices, explains how innovation works and puts forth a strategy proposal, all in an attempt to squirt ice water in America's ear.
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The Power of Story: Rewrite Your Destiny in Business and in Life
Loehr explains how to plumb the mind's depths with honest questioning and self-regard, then to rewrite stories using three basics of storytelling-purpose, truth and action-in order to fashion a new, healthy, mission-oriented narrative. Later chapters provide guidelines for rewriting, with instructions on "indoctrinateing yourself" and creating specific training "rituals" you can adopt to turn "story into action." [Read an Interview with Jim Loehr]
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Innovation: Create an Idea Culture. Redefine Your Business. Grow Your Profits
"Innovation is the engine of the world's economy because there is no end to the problems in this world, and there never will be." Tom Gorman explores three aspects to "The Engine of Endless Success": the skills of innovation, innovation in action, and innovation in specific situations. Why don't people engage in innovation? Assuming the worst, leaving it to someone else, just not caring.
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How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day
Michael Gelb says that we all can unlock the "da Vincian" genius inside us. Gelb says there are seven critical principles that need to be followed for success, whether you're learning a new language, studying to be a gourmet chef, or just hoping to be more effective on the job. [Read an Interview with Michael Gelb]
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The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking
"And just as we can develop and refind the skill with which we employ our opposable thumbs to perform tasks that once seemed impossible, I'm convinced we can also, with patient practice, develop the ability to use our opposable minds to unlock solutions to problems that seem to resist every effort to solve them."
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We Are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business
We are Smarter than Me is the first book to show anyone in business how to profit from the wisdom of crowds. Drawing on their own research and the insights from an enormous community of more than 4,000 people, Barry Libert and Jon Spector have written a book that reveals what works, and what doesn't, when you are building community into your decision making and business processes. [Read an Interview with Barry Libert]
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