Innovating From Within

Conventional business wisdom tells us that entrepreneurs are society’s main source of innovation. Young founders leave college with a big idea, get to work in a garage, and build something that changes the world. Typical corporate employees, strangled by slow-moving bureaucracy, are blocked from making transformative discoveries. In Driving Innovation from Within, strategist and advisor Kaihan Krippendorff disproves one of today’s biggest business myths to highlight lessons for innovators and leaders. He reveals how many of the modern world’s most impactful creations were invented by passionate employee innovators. If it were left up to go-it-alone entrepreneurs, we would not have mobile phones, personal computers, or e-mail. Distilling more than 150 interviews with internal innovators and leading experts along with insights from the latest research and today’s most successful companies, from Tencent and Amazon to Mastercard and Starbucks, Krippendorff lays out a step-by-step playbook to unlock innovation from the inside. He maps the barriers that frustrate efforts to disrupt from within and provides tools to remove them, detailing how visionary leaders can create islands of freedom inside an organization to activate existing employees’ potential and beat startups at their own game. Driving Innovation from Within is a practical and inspiring guide to leadership from all levels for those who want the fulfillment of changing the world without leaving their job in order to do it.

Innovation may be the hottest discipline around today, in business circles and beyond. And for good reason. Innovation transforms companies and markets. It is the key to solving vexing social problems. And it makes or breaks professional careers. For all the enthusiasm the topic inspires, however, the practice of innovation remains stubbornly impenetrable. No longer. In this book the author draws on stories from his research and field work with companies like Procter & Gamble to demystify innovation. He presents a simple definition of innovation, breaks down the essential differences between types of innovation, and illuminates innovation's vital role in organizational success and personal growth. This unique hybrid of professional memoir and business guidebook also provides a powerful 28-day program for mastering innovation's key steps: (1) Finding insight, (2) Generating ideas, (3) Building businesses, and (4) Strengthening innovation prowess in workforces and organizations. Using several illustrative case studies and vignettes from a range of companies around the globe, this playbook teaches people how to turn themselves or their companies into true innovation powerhouses.

"Innovation from Within: Redefining How Nonprofits Solve Problems guides nonprofit leaders in developing and implementing innovation from within their organization. Building on their demonstrated leadership, deep-rooted expertise, and organizational assets this book provides the tools to galvanize a movement of nonprofit and human service leaders to understand, practice, and implement social innovation"--

A modern framework for practical innovation—from individual ideas to an innovative organisational culture Everyone says that innovation is important. The problem is that no one tells you how to be innovative. Innovation is a State of Mind sets out a step-by-step guide to creating innovative ideas and putting them into action. You'll learn how to generate more ideas with greater potential, how to grow and evaluate them, test their effectiveness and then implement the ones that are going to improve your business. Author James O'Loghlin has worked with over a thousand of Australia's best inventors and innovators in the eight years he hosted ABC-TV's The New Inventors. He studied what they do differently and how they are able to identify and take advantage of opportunities that the rest of us miss. Packed with engaging stories and a good dose of humour, this insightful guide helps you to make innovation a part of what you do every day. Change your thinking and identify overlooked opportunities Step around common roadblocks to innovation Generate better ideas, and find the ones that will improve your business Create a culture where innovation is part of everyone's job Harvest innovative ideas from the entire staff and find the ones that will make a difference Innovators see things differently. They solve problems that the rest of us can't, and create solutions to problems that we never noticed we had. Getting stuck in routine and procedure is the death knell for modern business. Most companies undervalue and underuse the creative potential of their people, because they underestimate the impact of continuous innovation. Innovation is a State of Mind shows you how to think like an innovator and create a culture of innovation, so you can stay out in front of the future of business.

Winner of Balsillie Prize for Public Policy Winner of Donner Prize A challenge to prevailing ideas about innovation and a guide to identifying the best growth strategy for your community. Across the world, cities and regions have wasted trillions of dollars on blindly copying the Silicon Valley model of growth creation. Since the early years of the information age, we've been told that economic growth derives from harnessing technological innovation. To do this, places must create good education systems, partner with local research universities, and attract innovative hi-tech firms. We have lived with this system for decades, and the result is clear: a small number of regions and cities at the top of the high-tech industry but many more fighting a losing battle to retain economic dynamism. But are there other models that don't rely on a flourishing high-tech industry? In Innovation in Real Places, Dan Breznitz argues that there are. The purveyors of the dominant ideas on innovation have a feeble understanding of the big picture on global production and innovation. They conflate innovation with invention and suffer from techno-fetishism. In their devotion to start-ups, they refuse to admit that the real obstacle to growth for most cities is the overwhelming power of the real hubs, which siphon up vast amounts of talent and money. Communities waste time, money, and energy pursuing this road to nowhere. Breznitz proposes that communities instead focus on where they fit in the four stages in the global production process. Some are at the highest end, and that is where the Clevelands, Sheffields, and Baltimores are being pushed toward. But that is bad advice. Success lies in understanding the changed structure of the global system of production and then using those insights to enable communities to recognize their own advantages, which in turn allows to them to foster surprising forms of specialized innovation. As he stresses, all localities have certain advantages relative to at least one stage of the global production process, and the trick is in recognizing it. Leaders might think the answer lies in high-tech or high-end manufacturing, but more often than not, they're wrong. Innovation in Real Places is an essential corrective to a mythology of innovation and growth that too many places have bought into in recent years. Best of all, it has the potential to prod local leaders into pursuing realistic and regionally appropriate models for growth and innovation.

Create Business and Generate Profits inNew Markets through Innovation! “The best account I have read about how companies can enable and support internal entrepreneurs to achieve innovation-led growth.” Philip Kotler, S.C. Johnson & Son Professor of International Marketing, Kellogg School of Management “An essential resource for both private and public sector leaders seeking to align new business creation with an organization’s mission and strategy . . . and achieve results.” William J. Perry, former U.S. Secretary of Defense “Wolcott and Lippitz are not only insightful, they are spot on. This is exactly the book corporate leaders—from CEOs and functional executives to corporate entrepreneurial teams—need to help them navigate theexceptional challenges of organic growth and innovation.” Betsy Holden, Senior Advisor, McKinsey & Company, and former Co-CEO, Kraft Foods, Inc. About the Book: IBM reports $15 billion of annualnew revenues from 22 EmergingBusiness Opportunities. In 2008, $4 billion in revenues fromcompanywide innovation efforts allowedWhirlpool to maintain its top line, despiteglobal recession and the steep dropin housing markets. A DuPont business group leader,Ellen Kullman, backed an ambitious newbusiness creation program and laterbecame DuPont’s CEO. Each of these companies has learned how tocreate new businesses on a repeatable basis.In Grow from Within, two leading scholarsfrom the Kellogg School of Managementexplain how your company can discover theright approach to corporate entrepreneurshipand make it profitable. Taking innovation to the next level, corporateentrepreneurship is the process of buildingnew businesses within an established organization—new businesses that are distinctfrom the core company but that leveragesome of its most powerful assets.Grow from Within examines: The fundamentals of designing anew business The four dominant models ofcorporate entrepreneurship Ways to align your innovationprogram with your strategy Leadership requirements fordeveloping new businesses Innovation is critical to business successand growth, but it’s only the first step. Withoutstrategically driven processes to turninsights into growing businesses, even thebest ideas can fail. Creativity is often serendipitous;innovation management shouldnot be. Grow from Within provides the knowledgeyou need to conceive and design valuablenew businesses that breathe life into ideasand dramatically improve your top and bottomlines.

Innovation is a key source of competitive advantage, but it remains frustratingly elusive for many organizations. This book shows you how to close the innovation gap by making individuals and organizations systematically and sustainably innovative. You will learn how to embrace a culture of innovation and make it permeate every level of the organization. You will find a clear road map and practical tools to redefine your workplace's culture, identify and tap into the existing innovative intelligence, and develop leaders who can close the innovation gap for greater business success.

While intense efforts of clarification have been made to distinguish between the concept of system and ecosystem, and between the different forms of ecosystems, very few works have addressed the issues of how these different forms of ecosystems are interacting in a dynamic perspective, or of how the notion of a dynamic ecosystem could emerge from the static frame of a system approach. The five chapters in this volume precisely aim at adding to this literature by highlighting the interplay between different types of innovation systems. A common thread among the five chapters of the book is the recognition of the need to develop new lenses to formally account for adaptative behaviour within clusters, networks, or regional innovation systems using the ecosystem metaphor. The diversity and heterogeneity of agents, the complexity of relationships, and new forms of organisation (underground, middleground, and upperground) are the main characteristics of innovation ecosystems, in contrast to more traditional concepts like clusters or networks. In essence, the five chapters add various complexity dimensions (relationships, knowledge, systems, etc.) to the existing knowledge on ecosystems. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Industry and Innovation.