Boom Deciphering Innovation

Winning in An Age of Relentless Change and Disruption Today, we face a bewildering array of changes coming from many directions—globalization, government policy, market disorganization, technology, business trends, demographics, social distortion, and environmental uncertainty. These mega forces are disrupting how organizations do business and often determine whether they succeed or fail. Boom! Deciphering Innovation: How Disruption Drives Companies to Transform or Die is a 30,000-foot guide for leaders who need to make sense of the disruptive landscape, the nature of innovation, and the role of leadership in reinventing the future. The lessons are useful whether you are a leader in a big or small company, nonprofit or government organization. The book is designed to be a quick, fun read. The authors use lively, conversational language, pictures, and short case studies to tell the story of what happened, winners and losers, innovation and transformation. They also provide advice on the first steps in making a company future-ready. About the Authors Lisa Hendrickson is an award-winning serial entrepreneur, innovative strategist, thought leader and purposeful disruptor. An Inc. 500 and TEDx Speaker, she is known for her simple elegant solutions that address complex business problems. She is the founder of Spark City, a “Thinking Partner” consultancy that helps companies trail blaze new products, services and business models. For over 25 years, Jim Colwick has worked with executive teams in Fortune 500, mid-size and entrepreneurial corporations and government to reshape their futures. Jim has also held senior leadership positions in innovative, high-growth, technology consultancies focused on business strategy, technology optimization, customer experience and business transformation. Jim specializes in strategy, innovation, people and change.

“An interesting take on some factors that facilitate the development and bursting of bubbles in technology industries. . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice Financial market bubbles are recurring, often painful, reminders of the costs and benefits of capitalism. While many books have studied financial manias and crises, most fail to compare times of turmoil with times of stability. In Bubbles and Crashes, Brent Goldfarb and David A. Kirsch give us new insights into the causes of speculative booms and busts. They identify a class of assets—major technological innovations—that can, but does not necessarily, produce bubbles. This methodological twist is essential: Only by comparing similar events that sometimes lead to booms and busts can we ascertain the root causes of bubbles. Using a sample of eighty-eight technologies spanning 150 years, Goldfarb and Kirsch find that four factors play a key role in these episodes: the degree of uncertainty surrounding a particular innovation; the attentive presence of novice investors; the opportunity to directly invest in companies that specialize in the technology; and whether or not a technology is a good protagonist in a narrative. Goldfarb and Kirsch consider the implications of their analysis for technology bubbles that may be in the works today, offer tools for investors to identify whether a bubble is happening, and propose policy measures that may mitigate the risks associated with future speculative episodes.

Showing how entrepreneurs and investors can start up in Asia and go global, the book provides a first-hand, on-the-ground tour of the new technology centers that are gaining momentum all over Asia. Interviews with the most successful venture capitalists and entrepreneurs reveal their winning strategies and show how a new generation of entrepreneurs in China and India are no longer looking to the West for their cues - but are instead crafting their own local business models and success strategies.

Why has Western economic growth stalled? Conventional wisdom holds that America and Europe are on the threshold of an innovative boom, one that will lead to a new era of high economic growth. With expertise spanning academia and the business world, Fredrik Erixon and Björn Weigel refute this idea. Bringing together an array of data from the past 40 years and drawing on examples including Uber, Microsoft, Apple and IBM, they show that Western capitalism has lost its propensity for experimentation, adaptation and growth. This riveting book reveals the obstacles hindering our future prosperity. Erixon and Weigel argue that modern corporate practices are no longer compatible with a rapid increase in innovation-led economic growth. Western firms, today, have owners who want predictability and managers who shield companies from strong innovation competition. Governments have also played their part through the creation of excessive and complex regulations that foster uncertainty. And globalization - once a key force for global growth - no longer propels technology and competition as much as before. These forces have made capitalism dull, hidebound and, crucially, less receptive to innovation. The consequences of poor economic growth on inequality, opportunity and political stability surround us. Whilst many commentators and doyens of economics worry about the impact that robots will have on jobs, The Innovation Illusion shows why our primary concern should be a dearth of innovation. The authors lay out a road map to reverse this trend and help halt the trajectory of economic decline. Thought-provoking and insightful, this book is required reading for business leaders, policymakers and all those interested in the future. -- from dust jacket.

Amid mounting concern over the loss of jobs to low-wage economies, one fact is clear: America's prosperity hinges on the ability of its businesses to continually introduce new products and services. But what makes for a creative economy? How can the remarkable surge of innovation that fueled the boom of the 1990s be sustained? For an answer, Richard K. Lester and Michael J. Piore examine innovation strategies in some of the economy's most dynamic sectors. Through eye-opening case studies of new product development in fields such as cell phones, medical devices, and blue jeans, two fundamental processes emerge. One of these processes, analysis--rational problem solving--dominates management and engineering practice. The other, interpretation, is not widely understood, or even recognized--although, as the authors make clear, it is absolutely crucial to innovation. Unlike problem solving, interpretation embraces and exploits ambiguity, the wellspring of creativity in the economy. By emphasizing interpretation, and showing how these two radically different processes can be combined, Lester and Piore's book gives managers and designers the concepts and tools to keep new products flowing. But the authors also offer an unsettling critique of national policy. By ignoring the role of interpretation, economic policymakers are drawing the wrong lessons from the 1990s boom. The current emphasis on expanding the reach of market competition will help the analytical processes needed to implement innovation. But if unchecked it risks choking off the economy's vital interpretive spaces. Unless a more balanced policy approach is adopted, warn Lester and Piore, America's capacity to innovate--its greatest economic asset--will erode.

A small number of countries, regions, cities, and localities are powerful gatekeepers and generate the bulk of creative and innovative ideas, while the majority is largely excluded. This book looks at neglected, but emerging innovation centres analysed from various spatial and organizational perspectives; ranging from entire countries and regions to individual firms and small neighbourhoods. Bringing together leading scholars from various disciplines, it examines a variety of economic sectors including biotechnology, agrotourism, and the food retail industry. The authors employ various, often contradictory, concepts, ranging from local buzz and the global pipeline, through an analysis of collective learning processes to geographical embeddedness, using both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The purpose of the book is twofold: investigating changes occurring in the regions and cities under transformation and attempting to find common and unique mechanisms behind these changes. Consequently, the authors shed light on the scale and scope of the innovativeness of selected economic and social processes.

Do these comments sound familiar? We would love to be more innovative, but we don’t have the resources Innovation works in some companies; we just aren’t that creative We get some good ideas, but nothing ever happens with them Unfortunately, they reflect the general perception and environment for innovation in many firms today. In Lean Innovation: Understanding What's Next in Today's Economy, Barry Cross explores how to use Lean to free up resources from within the organization to support and ‘fund’ innovation and inspire a culture of creativity. Easy to read and humorous, Cross’ stories resonate and his tactics are very applicable. He demonstrates that you likely have the people needed to drive innovation. Based on Cross’s twenty-five years of experience, and filled with stories and anecdotes from a number of industries, the book presents a different look at innovation and how to recognize opportunities for moving past merely talking about innovation to action and making it a priority. The author examines roadblocks and how to use enablers like Lean to facilitate and focus the approach on driving the focus forward, to the place where creativity in our ranks is more important that responding to an email and where the organization isn’t afraid to make an existing product redundant in favor of a new opportunity.

Martin Fransman presents a new approach to understanding how innovation happens, who makes it happen, and the helps and hindrances. Looking at innovation in real-time under uncertainty, he develops the idea of an 'innovation ecosystem', i.e. a system of interrelated players and processes that jointly make innovation happen. Examples include: how companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, AT&T, and Huawei interact in the ICT Ecosystem; four innovations that changed the world - the transistor, microprocessor, optical fibre, and the laser; the causes of the telecoms boom and bust of the early 1990s that influenced the Great Recession from 2007; and the usefulness of the idea of innovation ecosystems for Chinese policy makers. By delving into the complex determinants of innovation this book provides a deeper, more rigorous understanding of how it happens. It will appeal to economists, social scientists, business people, policy makers, and anyone interested in innovation and entrepreneurship.