Eureka

Transform the art of innovation into a reliable system! System Driven Innovation enables you and everyone on your team to use innovation to work smarter, faster, and more creatively. It transforms innovation from a random act to a reliable science. This new mindset ignites confidence in the future. It enables the creation of bigger and bolder ideas—and turns them into reality faster, smarter, and more successfully. With this new mindset, innovation by everyone, everywhere, every day becomes the norm. The rapidly changing world becomes a tremendous opportunity to achieve greatness. Innovation Engineering defines innovation in two words: Meaningfully Unique. When a product, service, or job candidate is Meaningfully Unique customers are willing to pay more money for it. This links to the two simple truths in today’s marketplace: If you’re Meaningfully Unique life is great! If you’re NOT Meaningfully Unique you’d better be cheap. Innovation Engineering is a new field of academic study and leadership science. It teaches how to apply the science of system thinking to strategy, innovation, and cooperation. Research finds that it helps to increase innovation speed (up to 6x) and decrease risk (by 30 to 80%). Innovation Engineering accelerates the creation and development of more profitable products and services. However, the bigger benefit may well lie in its ability to transform organizational cultures by enabling everyone to work smarter every day. What makes Innovation Engineering unique is that it’s grounded in data, backed by academic theory, and validated in real-world practice. Collectively, it’s the number one documented innovation system on earth. Over 35,000 people have been educated in Innovation Engineering classes, and more than $15 billion in innovations are in active development. In his book Driving Eureka!, best-selling business author Doug Hall presents the System Driven Innovation scientific method for enabling innovation by everyone, everywhere, every day. It’s the essential resource you need to enable yourself—and your team—to innovate, succeed, and do amazing things that matter, on a daily basis.

While the discoveries of scientists have provided vital knowledge which has made innovation possible, it is more often than not the amateur who enjoys the "eureka moment" when an invention works for the first time. Weightman tells fascinating stories of struggle, rivalry, and the ingenuity of both famous inventors and hundreds of forgotten people, and offers a fresh take on the making of our modern world.

A Global Dynamics researcher has a breakthrough on her project visualizing another dimension. And since GD's experiments have a bad tendency to affect the entire town, Sheriff Jack Carter heads over to check it out. What he sees blows him away. The project has revealed a parallel universe, complete with another Eureka-one in which Carter doesn't exist! But as the two worlds begin to bleed into each other and residents confront their alternate selves, Carter may be the one man who can keep both Eurekas from being destroyed.

Ever reliable and responsible, Otis Halstead is a father, a husband (one half of a “well-dressed couple of substance”), and the CEO of Kansas Central Fire and Casualty. He has never done anything out of the ordinary. Until now. The change in Otis starts with the acquisition of an antique toy fire truck, the exact model he had pined for at age ten but never received. Next comes a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun. But Otis’s real coup is the purchase of his one true childhood passion: a red 1952 Cushman Pacemaker motor scooter. For his baffled wife, Sally, this is the final straw. She insists that he see a shrink. But when tragedy strikes uncomfortably close to home, Otis decides he wants out of his sensible, safe life in Eureka, Kansas. And so, a few weeks before his sixtieth birthday, Otis leaves town, heading west on old U.S. 56, a corporate CEO riding a forty-year-old motor scooter with a BB gun strapped to the side. One might say he was in for an adventure. Otis would say he was finally about to experience life.

Eureka. It’s what you say when you strike gold. It’s also a town in California where the truth might be buried forever. In New York Times bestselling author William Diehl’s thrilling, accomplished new novel, the seamy past of America’s most glamorous state lies in this deceptively peaceful area, one hundred miles north of Los Angeles. It was the lawless place from which young, rugged Thomas Culhane escaped to fight World War I. Now it’s a place where, two decades later, police detective Zeke Bannon investigates a death that seems a sad accident. Until you look a bit closer. The year is 1941. Verna Wilensky has been electrocuted in her bathtub, leaving a lower-middle-class life, no survivors, and a bank account packed with almost a hundred thousand dollars. Mysterious checks have consistently come to her for more than twenty years, most drawn from a bank in San Pietro, a town once known as Eureka. Eureka was a town that used to be a bootlegger’s paradise and a gangster’s dream. Now it is the rebuilt metropolis where Sheriff Thomas Culhane is launching a bid to be the golden state’s next governor. But something just might threaten his ambitions. As Bannon digs deeper into Wilensky’s demise, he unearths a decades-old secret that starts in a shootout, builds to a bloodbath, and could end up within the upper echelons of California’s elite, forever changing the destiny of a state. Rich in historical detail, complex in its connection between past and present, and filled with the nonstop action that are the hallmarks of this modern master, Eureka is an epic achievement of storytelling and suspense–William Diehl’s most extraordinary novel yet.

When it comes to science, too often people say "I just don't have the brains for it" -- and leave it at that. Why is science so intimidating, and why do people let themselves feel this way? What makes one person a scientist and another disinclined even to learn how to read graphs? The idea that scientists are people who wear lab coats and are somehow smarter than the rest of us is a common, yet dangerous, misconception that puts science on an intimidating pedestal. How did science become so divorced from everyday experience? In Eureka, science popularizer Chad Orzel argues that even the people who are most forthright about hating science are doing science, often without even knowing it. Orzel shows that science is central to the human experience: every human can think like a scientist, and regularly does so in the course of everyday activities. The common misconception is that science is a body of (boring, abstract, often mathematical) facts. In truth, science is a process: Looking at the world, Thinking about what makes it work, Testing your mental model by comparing it to reality, and Telling others about your results -- all things that people do daily. By revealing the connection between the everyday activities that people do -- solving crossword puzzles, playing sports, or even watching mystery shows on television -- and the processes used to make great scientific discoveries, Eureka shows that this process is one everybody uses regularly, and something that anyone can do.

Even the brightest of Eureka's residents can't read someone else's mind. Then Global Dynamics develops the Brain Box: a device capable of capturing and storing human thoughts. When the Box starts messing with people's minds, Sheriff Jack Carter will have to keep his thoughts to himself if he's going to save the town from going out of their heads.