Exploiting Chaos 150 Ways To Spark Innovation During Times Of Change

As founder of TrendHunter.com, Gutsche finds and shares thousands of innovations from around the world. In this book, he takes an historical look at companies that stagnated while others blossomed. From both perspectives, Gutsche draws lessons on creating a culture of revolution and exploiting chaos. The process starts with trend hunting. The next stage is adaptive innovation that involves definition, ideation, synthesis, a prototype, and testing. Then it's ready for infectious messaging.

The hottest trend spotter in North America reveals powerful strategies for thriving in any economic climate. Did you know that Hewlett?Packard, Disney, Hyatt, MTV, CNN, Microsoft, Burger King, and GE all started during periods of economic recession? Periods of uncertainty fuel tremendous opportunity, but the deck gets reshuffled and the rules of the game get changed. EXPLOITING CHAOS is the ultimate business survival guide for all those looking to change the world. Topics include: SPARKING A REVOLUTION, TREND: HUNTING, ADAPTIVE INNOVATION and INFECTIOUS MESSAGING.

Out-innovate, outsmart and outmaneuver your competitors with tactics from the CEO of TrendHunter.com, Jeremy Gutsche. In our world of chaos and change, what are you overlooking? If you knew the answer, you’d be a better innovator, better manager, and better investor. This book will make you better by teaching you how to overcome neurological traps that block successful people, like you, from realizing your full potential. Then, it will make you faster by teaching you 6 patterns of opportunity: Convergence, Divergence, Cyclicality, Redirection, Reduction and Acceleration. Each pattern you’ll learn is a repeatable shortcut that has created fortunes for ex-criminals, reclusive billionaires, disruptive CEOs and ordinary people who unexpectedly made it big. In an unparalleled study of 250,000 ideas, Jeremy and his TrendHunter.com team have leveraged their 100,000,000 person audience to study what actually causes opportunity: data-driven research that was never before possible. The result is a series of frameworks battle-tested with several hundred brands, and top executives at some of the most successful companies in the world who rely on Jeremy to accelerate their hunt for ideas. Better and Faster will help you learn to see patterns and clues wherever you look that will put you on the smarter, easier path to finding those breakthrough ideas, faster.

Learn to Innovate and Make Real Change In our era of disruption and possibility, there are so many great opportunities within your grasp; however, most smart and successful people miss out. Unfortunately, your capabilities are limited by the seven traps of path dependency, which cause you to repeat past decisions. These traps can limit you from seeing the potential of what could be. If you could overcome these traps, what could you accomplish? How much more successful could you be? Create the Future teaches you how to think disruptively, providing specific steps to create real innovation and change. This book combines Jeremy's high energy, provocative thinking with tactics that have been battle-tested through thousands of his team's projects advising leading innovators like Disney, Starbucks, Amex, IBM, Adidas, Google, and NASA. On top of all that, this is a double-sided book, paired with The Innovation Handbook, a revised edition of Jeremy's award-winning book, Exploiting Chaos.

From the cofounder of Square, an inspiring and entertaining account of what it means to be a true entrepreneur and what it takes to build a resilient, world-changing company In 2009, a St. Louis glassblowing artist and recovering computer scientist named Jim McKelvey lost a sale because he couldn't accept American Express cards. Frustrated by the high costs and difficulty of accepting credit card payments, McKelvey joined his friend Jack Dorsey (the cofounder of Twitter) to launch Square, a startup that would enable small merchants to accept credit card payments on their mobile phones. With no expertise or experience in the world of payments, they approached the problem of credit cards with a new perspective, questioning the industry's assumptions, experimenting and innovating their way through early challenges, and achieving widespread adoption from merchants small and large. But just as Square was taking off, Amazon launched a similar product, marketed it aggressively, and undercut Square on price. For most ordinary startups, this would have spelled the end. Instead, less than a year later, Amazon was in retreat and soon discontinued its service. How did Square beat the most dangerous company on the planet? Was it just luck? These questions motivated McKelvey to study what Square had done differently from all the other companies Amazon had killed. He eventually found the key: a strategy he calls the Innovation Stack. McKelvey's fascinating and humorous stories of Square's early days are blended with historical examples of other world-changing companies built on the Innovation Stack to reveal a pattern of ground-breaking, competition-proof entrepreneurship that is rare but repeatable. The Innovation Stack is a thrilling business narrative that's much bigger than the story of Square. It is an irreverent first-person look inside the world of entrepreneurship, and a call to action for all of us to find the entrepreneur within ourselves and identify and fix unsolved problems--one crazy idea at a time.

How our collective intelligence has helped us to evolve and prosper Humans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? This book shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains—on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations. Drawing insights from lost European explorers, clever chimpanzees, mobile hunter-gatherers, neuroscientific findings, ancient bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich demonstrates how our collective brains have propelled our species' genetic evolution and shaped our biology. Our early capacities for learning from others produced many cultural innovations, such as fire, cooking, water containers, plant knowledge, and projectile weapons, which in turn drove the expansion of our brains and altered our physiology, anatomy, and psychology in crucial ways. Later on, some collective brains generated and recombined powerful concepts, such as the lever, wheel, screw, and writing, while also creating the institutions that continue to alter our motivations and perceptions. Henrich shows how our genetics and biology are inextricably interwoven with cultural evolution, and how culture-gene interactions launched our species on an extraordinary evolutionary trajectory. Tracking clues from our ancient past to the present, The Secret of Our Success explores how the evolution of both our cultural and social natures produce a collective intelligence that explains both our species' immense success and the origins of human uniqueness.

One day Sophie comes home from school to find two questions in her mail: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" Before she knows it she is enrolled in a correspondence course with a mysterious philosopher. Thus begins Jostein Gaarder's unique novel, which is not only a mystery, but also a complete and entertaining history of philosophy.

This is the first book to comprehensibly describe how technology has shaped society and the environment over the last 200 years. It will be useful for researchers, as a textbook for graduate students, for people engaged in long-term policy planning in industry and government, for environmental activists, and for the wider public interested in history, technology, or environmental issues.