Innovation Best-Practices: the Index

This thread is about giving up your sources for Innovation best-practices.

Which magazines?
Which books?
Which gurus?
Which sites?

Hi CG,

I’d certainly have to say Larry Keeley is the guru - Having taken his class, I enjoyed learning his methods and concepts.

I’ve yet to find a website that is a comprehensive reference - we did some background research for ‘shopping for innovation’ and there isn’t much out there in terms of step by step, oriented towards design, mind you, not approaching it as corporate mgt and planning.

I’ll start with some of my favorites…

Find most of them in my “Listmania” list on Amazon:
http://tinyurl.com/849b3


Recommended Books:

10 Rules for Strategic Innovators, VG & Trimble
Weird Ideas that Work, Sutton
The Creative Priority, Hirschberg
Good to Great & Built to Last, Collins
Making Innovation Work, Davila & Epstein & Shelton
The Design of Things to Come, Cagen & Vogel
Get Back in the Box, Innovating from the Inside Out,
Blue Ocean Strategy, Kim & Mauborgne
The Art of Innovation, Kelley
Jump Start Your Brain, Hall
How to Get Ideas, Foster
Serious Play, Schrage
The Innovator’s Dilemma, Christensen
Crossing the Chasm, Moore
Blink, Gladwell
The New Culture of Desire, Davis

Books I have yet to read:
The Medici Effect, Johansson
The Ten Faces of Innovation, Kelley
Innovation that Fits, Lord & deBethizy & Wager
The Seeds of Innovation, Dundon
Democratizing Innovation, von Hippel
Fast Innovation, George & Works & Watson-Hemphill
Juice: the Creative Fuel that Drives World-Class Inventors, Schwartz
What Customers Want, Ulwick
Building Great Customer Experiences, Shaw & Ivens
Spark-Be more innovative through co-creation, Winsor

Thanks for the jumpstart, now that I see your list of books, here are concurrent referrences:

Geoffrey Moore’s blog, Dealing with Darwin
http://geoffmoore.blogs.com/my_weblog/

Podcast interviews after the Fortune Innovation conference. Includes von Hippel and W.Chan Kim
http://www.businessinnovation2005.com/archives/podcasts/index.php

InnovAsia

The Innovator’s Dilemma, Christensen

The remaining two in the series are also worth reading - “The Innovator’s Solution” and “Seeing Whats Next”.

This is a great list; of course it reminds me of how incredibly overloaded my bookshelf is with things that I want to read. I think I’m taking more of a diversionary approach to reading. Reading for leisure and pleasure doesn’t always directly stimulate my thinking about real-world problems, but it’s maybe more of an exercise than a project.

Of course, my shelf runneth over with both fiction and non-fiction alike.

Agreed that there are way too many things that I want to read, however I must confess that innovation books are not really among them. I do not doubt though that there are some good ones here on these lists, given those who have recommended them.

And yet, whenever I read “business” books and that includes case studies in HBR and elsewhere, I am often annoyed by what seems to always feel like a continual repackaging of the same story - i.e. the familiar: “Team A faces challenge X, uses process B in some novel way to create hit Y.”

I read in order to fuel interpretive powers and to strengthen perspective. Books that are further afield from “Innovation,” “Business” and “Design” seem to be more interesting and useful for those purposes because they examine subjects that I do not already know about. Right now I am reading Tony Judt’s new epic “Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945.”

http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,0_1594200653,00.html

(It is chewy but, more useful in understanding the current state of the world than most of what passes for journalism.)

I agree with you Steve, fiction is also critical…what fiction can you recommend?

I enjoyed Purple Cow by Seth Godin. The great thing about his book is that you can read it in an afternoon - you don’t get worn out with his ideas because he doesn’t spend more than a page on each ‘lesson.’ Its small enough that’s its easy refer others as well.

On the subject of non design-biz-innovation books, I like Chuck Palahniuk, writer of Fight Club. Also try Lullaby, Beautiful Monsters, or any of his others.

fiction:

As a sci fi fan, I find heinlein’s concepts fascinating in stranger in a strange land

orson scott cards short story Unaccompanied Sonata and anthology of the same name

Friends of Foundaton - short stories based on Asimov’s foundation series


in “other”

fountainhead is a ‘design’ classic in architecture

prefer atlas shrugged tho’ - IP and the market economy :slight_smile:

i pick my sources randomly and often they’re not from design unless i’m doing a retro which means research on things like the style, culture, technology, etc.

i rely heavily on my imagination and the use of correct material. in other words i never try to be alamode rather create something that is essentially unique yet leaves a lot of room for development.

it’s my philosophy that if a designer has no idea of the future development of a design or a process then that design has a problem in modern product development settings.