My company's annual innovation conference is today and I'll be participating in a panel of innovators. As a result, innovation is on my mind so I thought I would post my favorite innovation resources. Unfortunately, this is only a quick list of links as I don't have time to discuss in detail what I like about each resource. Perhaps this will be a theme for a future series of posts.
Innovation
- The Innovator's Solution: sequel to The Innovator's Dilemma, I prefer this book as it discusses many secondary factors related to disruption and how to avoid it. Key points to me were transitions between tightly-integrated and modular architectures and avoiding products that are incremental innovations for incumbents.
- Drucker's Innovation and Entrepreneurship: simply a great book that should be required reading for every innovator, entrepreneur, and executive manager. Based on my years of experience as an innovator within a large company I found Drucker's insights and advice to be relevant, pragmatic, and actionable. Given its publication date, it appears to me that this book served as the foundation for the "popular" innovation books of the 90's and beyond. Reading Drucker's book helped to provide more context for those later works. This book is well worth the time to read it.
- The Doblin Group's Ten Types of Innovation: a great cheat-sheet summarizing the various forms of innovation. I have this hanging on my office wall at work.
- Skate to Where the Money Will Be: perhaps one of the most important papers for any innovator to read, especially those involved in long term strategic planning for an established company.
- Creating New Market Space: a great HBS article on systematic ways of identifying new market opportunities.
- What is a Strategy: to some degree innovating is deeply tied to defining a strategy. As a result, it's important to understand what a strategy is and Porter is a leading thinker in this area.
- The Myths of Innovation: a thought provoking book that dispels some of the myths surrounding innovation.
- Serious Play: a decent book that makes the important point that sometimes a model or prototype is needed to serve as the catalyst and focal point for exploratory innovation. I've spent most of my engineering career building prototypes so I found this book to be a thoughtful resource.
- The Power of Product Platforms: written by one of my MBA professors, this book introduces the concept of using modular architectures to build derivative products to serve different market segments. A powerful concept in my experience.
- Eureka! It Really Takes Years of Hard Work: a nice New York Times article discussing the fact that innovation is often the result of a lot of hard work and not an instantaneous eureka moment.
Execution
- Crossing the Chasm: Geoffrey Moore's classic book about making the transition from the early to mainstream markets. A lot of great advice for innovators.
- Dealing with Darwin: another Moore classic, this one discusses how to structure an organization to maintain a pipeline of innovations and sustain corporate growth. A good read for anyone involved in maintaining an established business.
- That Art of the Start: a great and inspiring book on starting a new venture. I particularly appreciated the no nonsense advice and strong focus on fundamentals. My bias towards the latter has always made me feel like a "pseudo-MBA" so Guy's advice increased my confidence in my own opinions in this area.
Creative Problem Solving
- ThinkerToys: a great resource for creative thinking techniques.
- Back of the Napkin: sometimes a whiteboard or pen+paper are the most powerful tools for communicating ideas and innovations. This book provides great tips on visual thinking and communication.
- The Mind Map Book: I have found mind-mapping to be a very effective and powerful technique for creative thinking. Written by the one of the original proponents of mind-mapping, this is a good resource for learning how to create and use mind-maps.
- How to think Like Einstein: despite the cheeky title this book contains useful tips on creative thinking.
- How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci: same as the above, cheeky title but good advice.
As I mentioned, this is just a short list of the resources that I've found most useful. In future posts I may discuss these and other resources in more detail.
