The Innovative Team

New tools for tapping the creativity of teams and achieving breakthrough results The Innovative Team is an engaging business fable that reveals the impact our underlying work style preferences have on our teams and their results. The authors present a breakthrough thinking process for developing successful teams. They introduce a uniquely effective set of tools built on FourSight, a measure of problem-solving preferences field-tested by top consultants, which can help anyone from professionals to novices solve problems and achieve performance breakthroughs. FourSight enables teams to understand their patterns of thinking and manage themselves more deliberately toward accomplishing a goal. Written as a business fable that recounts the story of a team's journey from dysfunctional to high functioning Outlines a new and effective set of tools for enhanced team performance Details the four stages of a dynamic breakthrough thinking process The Innovative Team offers a great resource for management and leadership development professionals, team leaders, and anyone interested in kick-starting innovation in their workplaces and lives.

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.

Don't leave creativity up to the "creatives" in your organization. Fostering creativity within your team can help your organization solve problems, create innovative products, break out into a new market, and even communicate and collaborate more effectively. Innovative Teams shows you how to: Create the right environment for inventive thinking Build a diverse team Generate a wide array of new ideas Manage disagreements Make sure your ideas actually get implemented Don't have much time? Get up to speed fast on the most essential business skills with HBR's 20-Minute Manager series. Whether you need a crash course or a brief refresher, each book in the series is a concise, practical primer that will help you brush up on a key management topic. Advice you can quickly read and apply, for ambitious professionals and aspiring executives--from the most trusted source in business. Also available as an ebook.

This textbook presents a comprehensive analysis of organizational behavior in sport organizations from a practitioner's perspective. It covers issues related to managing employees and work teams as well as organizational structure and culture in sport. The book has four sections: Organizational Behavior in the Sports Industry, Getting to Know Employees and Volunteers of Sport Organizations, Work Groups and Teams, and Understanding the Organization. Each chapter begins with a practitioner interview describing a challenge that was overcome by their organization. That example is used to highlight applicable theories and interventions used in the industry. Additional examples or theories are discussed to provide students a broad picture of managerial issues in the sports industry and provide alternative approaches to intervention illustrated in the practitioner interview. The case studies offer the opportunity to practice and apply the ideas to real-world scenarios in the sports industry. Students using this book will gain an understanding of how managers and leaders apply theory to communicate with and engage employees to foster desired organizational cultures while being challenged to address common issues using cases and hypothetical situations.

Innovation is critical for securing competitive advantage and achieving business success. Yet, for many organisations it remains elusive. This book adopts a unique approach to innovation by focussing on how teams may deliver innovations capable of transforming their company's performance. The book starts with the dynamics of innovation and explores the creative processes. It moves onto examine how teams can collaborate to create innovative team values and also shows how a company can organise and lead innovative teams. Finally, including many exercises, the book shows how to design innovative team programmes and measure performance.

This book presents unique insights and advice on defining and managing the innovation transformation journey. Using novel ideas, examples and best practices, it empowers management executives at all levels to drive cultural, technological and organizational changes toward innovation. Covering modern innovation techniques, tools, programs and strategies, it focuses on the role of the latest technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence to discover, handle and manage ideas), methodologies (including Agile Engineering and Rapid Prototyping) and combinations of these (like hackathons or gamification). At the same time, it highlights the importance of culture and provides suggestions on how to build it. In the era of AI and the unprecedented pace of technology evolution, companies need to become truly innovative in order to survive. The transformation toward an innovation-led company is difficult – it requires a strong leadership and culture, advanced technologies and well-designed programs. The book is based on the author’s long-term experience and novel ideas, and reflects two decades of startup, consulting and corporate leadership experience. It is intended for business, technology, and innovation leaders.

"Great teams are comprised of ordinary people that are empowered and inspired. They are empowered to solve hard problems in ways their customers love yet work for their business. They are inspired with ideas and techniques for quickly evaluating those ideas to discover solutions that work: they are valuable, usable, feasible and viable. This book is about the idea and reality of "achieving extraordinary results from ordinary people". Empowered is the companion to Inspired. It addresses the other half of the problem of building tech products?how to get the absolute best work from your product teams. However, the book's message applies much more broadly than just to product teams. Inspired was aimed at product managers. Empowered is aimed at all levels of technology-powered organizations: founders and CEO's, leaders of product, technology and design, and the countless product managers, product designers and engineers that comprise the teams. This book will not just inspire companies to empower their employees but will teach them how. This book will help readers achieve the benefits of truly empowered teams"--

Discover the MIT-developed, “doer’s approach” to innovation with this guide that reveals you don’t need an earth-shattering idea to create a standout product, service, or business—just a hunch that you can scale up to impact. Innovation is the subject of countless books and courses, but there’s very little out there about how you actually innovate. Innovation and entrepreneurship are not one and the same, although aspiring innovators often think of them that way. They are told to get an idea and a team and to build a show-and-tell for potential investors. In Innovating, Luis Perez-Breva describes another approach—a doer’s approach developed over a decade at MIT and internationally in workshops, classes, and companies. He shows that innovating doesn’t require an earth-shattering idea; all it takes is a hunch. Anyone can do it. By prototyping a problem and learning by being wrong, innovating can be scaled up to make an impact. As Perez-Breva demonstrates, “nothing is new” at the outset of what we only later celebrate as innovation. In Innovating, the process—illustrated by unique and dynamic artwork—is shown to be empirical, experimental, nonlinear, and incremental. You give your hunch the structure of a problem. Anything can be a part. Your innovating accrues other people’s knowledge and skills. Perez-Breva describes how to create a kit for innovating, and outlines questions that will help you think in new ways. Finally, he shows how to systematize what you’ve learned: to advocate, communicate, scale up, manage innovating continuously, and document—“you need a notebook to converse with yourself,” he advises. Everyone interested in innovating also needs to read this book.