More Than Good Ideas

What is the best way for a company to innovate? That's exactly the wrong question.The better question: How can organizations get the maximum possible value from their innovationinvestments? Advice recommending "innovation vacations" and the luxury of failure may bewonderful for organizations with time to spend and money to waste. But this book addresses theinnovation priorities of companies that live in the real world of limits. They want fast, frugal,and high impact innovations. They don't just seek superior innovation, they want superiorinnovators. In The Innovator's Hypothesis, innovation expertMichael Schrage advocates a cultural and strategic shift: small teams, collaboratively--andcompetitively -- crafting business experiments that make top management sit up and take notice.Creativity within constraints -- clear deadlines and clear deliverables -- is what seriousinnovation cultures do. Schrage introduces the 5X5 framework: giving diverse teams of five people upto five days to come up with portfolios of five business experiments costing no more than $5,000each and taking no longer than five weeks to run. The book describes multiple portfolios of 5X5experiments drawn from Schrage's advisory work and innovation workshops worldwide. These includefinancial service approaches for improving customer service and addressing security challenges; apharmaceutical company's hypotheses for boosting regulatory compliance; and a diaper divisions'efforts to give babies and parents alike better "diapering experiences" withglow-in-the-dark adhesives, diagnostic capability, and bundled wipes. Schrage's5X5 is enterprise innovation gone viral: Successful 5X5s make people more effective innovators, andmore effective innovators mean more effective innovations.

This engaging and highly regarded book takes readers through the key stages of their PhD research journey, from the initial ideas through to successful completion and publication. It gives helpful guidance on forming research questions, organising ideas, pulling together a final draft, handling the viva and getting published. Each chapter contains a wealth of practical suggestions and tips for readers to try out and adapt to their own research needs and disciplinary style. This text will be essential reading for PhD students and their supervisors in humanities, arts, social sciences, business, law, health and related disciplines.

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.

How companies can significantly boost ethics and morale. Shares a wealth of effective ideas used around the country, from hiring and firing to compensation and communication. Includes an extensive bonus section on writing an effective corporate ethics code.

In this book, one of our most innovative, popular thinkers, Steven Johnson, takes on one of life's key questions: where do good ideas come from?

The #1 New York Times bestseller. Over 20 million copies sold! Translated into 60+ languages! Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving--every day. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results. If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Here, you'll get a proven system that can take you to new heights. Clear is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. Here, he draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible. Along the way, readers will be inspired and entertained with true stories from Olympic gold medalists, award-winning artists, business leaders, life-saving physicians, and star comedians who have used the science of small habits to master their craft and vault to the top of their field. Learn how to: make time for new habits (even when life gets crazy); overcome a lack of motivation and willpower; design your environment to make success easier; get back on track when you fall off course; ...and much more. Atomic Habits will reshape the way you think about progress and success, and give you the tools and strategies you need to transform your habits--whether you are a team looking to win a championship, an organization hoping to redefine an industry, or simply an individual who wishes to quit smoking, lose weight, reduce stress, or achieve any other goal.

Non-profits are big business. As the sector expands to embrace new issues, there is increased pressure for accountability, relevancy, and efficiency. Practitioners are expected to be experts in a variety of fields. In Five Good Ideas, forty professionals from successful non-profits large and small offer information, strategies for action, and management solutions that are easy to implement and will improve how organizations function. Alan Broadbent is the chair of Avana Capital, Tides Canada Foundation, and Maytree, and is the author of Urban Nation. Ratna Omidvar is the president of Maytree and is The Globe and Mail's 2010 Nation Builder of the Decade for Citizenship.

Are you looking for a great idea or some inspiration to make your business more effective and cutting edge? Do you need to motivate and inspire your employees, shareholders or customers? Do you need to turbocharge your career? Do you want to do things differently? By starting each day with a new idea, you can meet the challenges of modern-day business and work with energy and creativity. This bumper book contains 365 more great business ideas, one for each day of the year, extracted from the world’s best companies and managers. From marketing to PR, presentations to time management, starting up new businesses to reducing costs, sales to writing great copy, each idea is succinctly described and is followed by advice on how it can be applied to the reader’s own business situation. More Great Ideas a Day… is the companion guide to the best-selling An Idea a Day and offers even more ideas in a simple but potenitally powerful book for anyone seeking new inspiration and that killer application in their business and work life.