Innovation As Usual

Turn team members into innovators Most organizations approach innovation as if it were a sideline activity. Every so often employees are sent to “Brainstorm Island”: an off-site replete with trendy lectures, creative workshops, and overenthusiastic facilitators. But once they return, it’s back to business as usual. Innovation experts Paddy Miller and Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg suggest a better approach. They recommend that leaders at all levels become “innovation architects,” creating an ecosystem in which people engage in key innovation behaviors as part of their daily work. In short, this book is about getting to a state of “innovation as usual,” where regular employees—in jobs like finance, marketing, sales, or operations—make innovation happen in a way that’s both systemic and sustainable. Instead of organizing brainstorming sessions, idea jams, and off-sites that rarely result in success, leaders should guide their people in what the authors call the “5 + 1 keystone behaviors” of innovation: focus, connect, tweak, select, stealthstorm, (and the + 1) persist: • Focus beats freedom: Direct people to look only for ideas that matter to the business • Insight comes from the outside: Urge people to connect to new worlds • First ideas are flawed: Challenge people to tweak and reframe their initial ideas • Most ideas are bad ideas: Guide people to select the best ideas and discard the rest • Stealthstorming rules: Help people navigate the politics of innovation • Creativity is a choice: Motivate everyone to persist in the five keystone behaviors Using examples from a wide range of companies such as Pfizer, Index Ventures, Lonza, Go Travel, Prehype, DSM, and others, Innovation as Usual lights the way toward embedding creativity in the DNA of the workplace. So cancel that off-site. Instead, read Innovation as Usual—and put innovation at the core of your business.

You’re too close to your business, and it’s killing your creativity Traditional business structures love stability and predictability. Yet many organizations believe the two essential ingredients for long-term success are creativity and innovation. Kiirsten May and Alex Varricchio, founders of the marketing agency UpHouse, call the relationship between these two opposing expectations the Proximity Paradox™ — the belief that those who are closest to a subject are best-qualified to innovate for it, when, in reality, intense proximity limits creativity. Instead, people need to create distance from challenges in order to see the best way forward. May and Varricchio believe that until we can separate innovation and execution within ourselves, we will only innovate to the level at which we can execute the idea. To be effective, we need to create distance between our innovation brain and our execution brain. Unpacking ten common Proximity Paradoxes that affect a company’s people, processes, and industry, the authors share some practical ideas to create the distance necessary for your next great idea. An especially valuable book for creatives, and non-creatives in creative industries, but equally applicable to all businesses that depend on innovation, The Proximity Paradox encourages us to ask hard questions about how we work, how our businesses are structured, and why we routinely find our creativity at odds with what’s asked of us as executors and stewards of the bottom line.

"The author makes a compelling case that we often start solving a problem before thinking deeply about whether we are solving the right problem. If you want the superpower of solving better problems, read this book." -- Eric Schmidt, former CEO, Google Are you solving the right problems? Have you or your colleagues ever worked hard on something, only to find out you were focusing on the wrong problem entirely? Most people have. In a survey, 85 percent of companies said they often struggle to solve the right problems. The consequences are severe: Leaders fight the wrong strategic battles. Teams spend their energy on low-impact work. Startups build products that nobody wants. Organizations implement "solutions" that somehow make things worse, not better. Everywhere you look, the waste is staggering. As Peter Drucker pointed out, there's nothing more dangerous than the right answer to the wrong question. There is a way to do better. The key is reframing, a crucial, underutilized skill that you can master with the help of this book. Using real-world stories and unforgettable examples like "the slow elevator problem," author Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg offers a simple, three-step method - Frame, Reframe, Move Forward - that anyone can use to start solving the right problems. Reframing is not difficult to learn. It can be used on everyday challenges and on the biggest, trickiest problems you face. In this visually engaging, deeply researched book, you’ll learn from leaders at large companies, from entrepreneurs, consultants, nonprofit leaders, and many other breakthrough thinkers. It's time for everyone to stop barking up the wrong trees. Teach yourself and your team to reframe, and growth and success will follow.

Innovation, the conversion of the new to business as usual, is a very special business process. It is the business process able to reprogram all others. Creating the practices that make this process work is a key challenge for all in financial services that are worried about responding to the future. When an institution can identify things that are outside its present practices and convert them, production line style, into products, processes, cultural changes, or new markets, it will never be outpaced by internal or external change again. The institution becomes "FutureProof". This is a book about those practices in banks. It explains, using examples from institutions around the world, what it takes to create an innovation culture that consistently introduces new things into undifferentiated markets and internal cultures. It shows how banks can leverage the power of the new to establish unexpected revenue lines, or make old ones grow. And it provides advice on the social and political factors that either help or hinder the germination of the new in banks. Moreover, though, this is a book about the science of innovation in a banking context. Drawing from practices already highly developed in financial services—managing portfolios of assets to mitigate risk—it explains how practitioners can run their innovations groups like any other business line in the bank one that delivers a return on investment predictably and at high multiples of internal cost of capital. For leaders, Innovation and the Future Proof Bank provides the diagnostic tools to guide benchmarking and investment decisions for the innovation function. And for innovation practitioners, the book lays out everything needed to make sure that converting the new to business as usual is predictable, measurable, and profitable.

You can’t ask for more than efficient, effective operations. Or can you? Given today’s business landscape—increasing customer demand, global competition, lower trade barriers—being good isn’t enough. This groundbreaking guide provides the knowledge and tools you need to transform your organization from a well-run company to a relentlessly innovative company. Innovation expert Jeffrey Phillips has helped businesses around the world achieve the dream—the implementation of innovation as a consistent business discipline. In Relentless Innovation, he reveals his secrets for the first time. Phillips argues that today’s typical business models actually impede innovation because they place so much focus on efficiency, cost cutting, and short-term gain. Does this describe your business model? If it does, you need to revisit your approach and redefine your idea of what success actually is. You may find that your “business as usual” processes actively reject innovation efforts. Relentless Innovation has everything you need to strike the right balance between efficiency and innovation. Striking that balance will help your firm: Become proactive instead of reactive Create a more engaged workforce Establish deeper capabilities to define and achieve strategic goals Increase revenues and profits while retaining efficient cost management Sustain market differentiation Improve your public reputation Increase your ability to leverage internal knowledge and external partnerships Offering the broadest view to date of the relationship between innovation and business strategy, Relentless Innovation provides you with the information and tools you need to transform innovation from an infrequent activity to a core capability in your organization. PRAISE FOR RELENTLESS INNOVATION “A thoughtful, intelligent, and practical manifesto by a highly experienced innovation professional. Phillips demonstrates with clarity and insight how organizations can assess their current innovation potential, identify vulnerabilities, and most important, create a systemic innovation-as-usual culture that can make the difference between also-ran and yes-we-can.” —Tim Hurson, author of Think Better “Relentless Innovation is a must read for innovation junkies and executives who want practical ideas on creating an innovation business-as-usual culture. Phillips has worked in the innovation trenches and shares big-win ideas on how to unleash trapped middle management potential.” —Saul Kaplan, Founder and Chief Catalyst, Business Innovation Factory “Phillips has long been in the top tier of professionals who have a clear understanding of what makes innovation work in business. This book will provide you (and your team) with proven creative strategies and practical ideas that you can use to gain greater success in your market. Relentless Innovation is highly recommended.” —Roger von Oech , author of A Whack on the Side of the Head and The Creative Whack Pack “Relentless Innovation not only outlines the barriers to innovation in a way most readers will quickly understand, it provides a prescription that, when followed, can remedy the situation before efforts stall out.” —Dominic Venturo, Chief Innovation Officer, U.S. Bank Payment Services

A guide to creating and sustaining a culture of innovation focused on business value The Innovator’s Path introduces business readers to thought leader Madge M. Meyer’s unique, cross-cultural perspective on corporate innovation. The book presents eight essential disciplines (Listen, Lead, Position, Promote, Connect, Commit, Execute, and Evolve) that pave the way for individuals, teams, and organizations to continually innovate in ways that create new business value. The author overturns existing assumptions about inspiring and managing innovation, while offering new insights and practical advice for aspiring innovators and corporate leaders. Meyer demonstrates her points by telling the stories behind many of her award-winning results and adds engaging personal anecdotes to illustrate many of her points. The book also contains contributions from an extraordinary and diverse set of industry innovators. Offers new ways for cultivating a mindset and culture of results-focused innovation and business value creation Equips CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, CMOs, COOs, CTOs and aspiring innovators with proven principles and practices for leading innovation Focuses her readers' attention on the eight essential disciplines that help individuals, teams, and organizations innovate more successfully Whether your focus is on your career, your team's success, or your organization's future, The Innovator’s Path provides you with the insights, strategies, techniques, and inspiration you need to accelerate your innovation progress.

The definitive history of America’s greatest incubator of innovation and the birthplace of some of the 20th century’s most influential technologies “Filled with colorful characters and inspiring lessons . . . The Idea Factory explores one of the most critical issues of our time: What causes innovation?” —Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review “Compelling . . . Gertner's book offers fascinating evidence for those seeking to understand how a society should best invest its research resources.” —The Wall Street Journal From its beginnings in the 1920s until its demise in the 1980s, Bell Labs-officially, the research and development wing of AT&T-was the biggest, and arguably the best, laboratory for new ideas in the world. From the transistor to the laser, from digital communications to cellular telephony, it's hard to find an aspect of modern life that hasn't been touched by Bell Labs. In The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner traces the origins of some of the twentieth century's most important inventions and delivers a riveting and heretofore untold chapter of American history. At its heart this is a story about the life and work of a small group of brilliant and eccentric men-Mervin Kelly, Bill Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce, and Bill Baker-who spent their careers at Bell Labs. Today, when the drive to invent has become a mantra, Bell Labs offers us a way to enrich our understanding of the challenges and solutions to technological innovation. Here, after all, was where the foundational ideas on the management of innovation were born.

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.