Business Innovation

Companies stumble when they imagine that innovation is mostly about ideas. The reality is that ideas are only beginnings. Indeed, even a company with the world’s best idea still faces a devilish challenge: it must build the business of tomorrow without endangering the business of today. Beyond the Idea is an essential book for any business that recognizes that innovation always has been, and always will be, the key to long term growth and vitality.

In this compelling journey through twenty-six countries, Simon Mundy traces how the struggle to respond to the climate crisis is rapidly reshaping the modern world–shattering communities, shaking global business and propelling waves of cutting-edge innovation. Telling unforgettable human stories, meeting scientists and business tycoons, activists and political leaders, this is an account of disaster and survival, of frantic adaptation and groundbreaking innovation, of hope, and of the forces that will define our future.

Who’s going to write the next chapter in the saga of American business? Who’s going to chronicle the best way to compete, the new way to win? That’s the mission of Mavericks at Work, a book that profiles a network of rebels who are creating a new business model that makes use of fresh principles and captures what it means to be a state-of-the-art organization. Including such pioneering companies as ING Direct, Southwest Airlines, Pixar, HBO, Anthropologie, Craigslist, Netflix, and Commerce Bank, this book is nothing short of a lively new intellectual agenda for business.

The title, Evolve or Die, is somewhat blunt, and it is an exaggeration. But my belief is that it’s closer to the truth than many people realize. And it’s my genuine hope that this book and the stories within on innovating and creating are of real interest and benefit to you. It might seem trite to write this, but (in reference to Henry David Thoreau) you weren’t meant to settle for a life of quiet desperation. You’ll need to innovate and create.

What if the most powerful business asset you’ll own isn’t your team, your technology, or even your intellectual property—but your prompts? In “Prompt to the Future,” Daniel Kim reveals how AI frameworks are fundamentally reshaping innovation and business. Through vivid personal experiences—from late-night epiphanies with AI-generated music to building Meteor, an AI-powered book creation platform—Kim demonstrates why we’re experiencing nothing less than “the end of innocence” in our relationship with technology. This isn’t another cautionary tale about AI replacing ...

Today’s board rooms, think tanks, and staff lounges are more diverse than ever before. These cultural differences can either lead to gridlock among stubborn, single-minded thinkers or they can catalyze innovation and growth among an expansive team of creative, distinctive individuals. Diverse teams are far more creative than homogenous teams—but only when they are managed effectively. Driven by Difference identifies the management practices necessary to minimize conflict while maximizing the informational diversity found in varied values and experiences.

The Zero in Formula, Dennis Geelen's latest book, challenges business owners, CEO's, and leaders to think differently about their company. The stats don't lie. A large percentage of businesses do not make it past the first few years. Of the ones that do, only a small percentage end up surviving past 15 years. Many of those that survive have now plateaued or are in decline. You will learn what it means to be customer centric, with strategies and tools you can apply to your business. You will be guided through the recipe step-by-step to build your successful foundation.

In his instant self-help classic, the international bestseller How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, Michael J. Gelb identified seven aspects of da Vinci's genius that contemporary readers can emulate and apply in their own lives.

Toxic workplace, politics making your head spin, and team performance keeping you up at night? Is your bottom-line suffering because people are reluctant to try new approaches? Become a leader whose presence exudes psychological safety and sparks leadership in others. You can be a catalyst for promoting happiness, productivity, financial success, and innovation.

Vaughn Tan opens up the black box of elite culinary R&D to provide essential insights. Drawing on years of unprecedented access to the best and most influential culinary R&D teams in the world, he reveals how they exemplify what he calls the uncertainty mindset. Such a mindset intentionally incorporates uncertainty into organization design rather than simply trying to reduce risk. It changes how organizations hire, set goals, and motivate team members and leads organizations to work in highly unconventional ways.

Musicians may just hold the keys to innovation in business. They don’t think like we do, and in the creative process, they don’t act like we do. It’s no coincidence that some of the world’s most respected creators are also entrepreneurs. In Two Beats Ahead, Panos A. Panay, senior vice president for strategy at Berklee College of Music, and R. Michael Hendrix, global design director at IDEO, interview some of the nation’s top musicians and business leaders about how they approach innovation differently.

Traditional leadership frameworks emphasize control over making connections, but that underestimates the value of collaboration. By sharing the lessons of facilitative leadership, Invisible Leader gives you a new framework for tapping into your team’s potential. This book will show you how to approach, prepare, and guide team meetings to their best outcomes as well as how to use reflection to improve every stage of your work.

The Art of Change Leadership represents a major milestone in the study of change leadership. An approachable yet thorough guide for leaders and team members that illustrates how to increase speed and agility during times of intense technological innovation and fast change, this resource focuses on the ways in which you, as an individual, can harness your unique abilities to lead cultural change and personal leadership in a positive and proactive way.

As the first book of its kind, Artificial Intelligence in Business and Technology guides listeners on an expansive journey through the transformative world of AI, offering a thorough dissection of this game-changing technology that promises to redefine our future.

For more than twenty years, major innovations—the kind that transform industries and even societies—seem to have come almost exclusively from startups. Established companies still dominate most markets, but despite massive efforts and millions of dollars, they can't seem to achieve the same kinds of foundational breakthroughs. The problem, say Tony Davila and Marc Epstein, is that the very processes and structures responsible for established companies' enduring success prevent them from developing breakthroughs. This is the innovation paradox.

You always knew digital was going to change things, but you didn’t realize how close to home it would hit. In every industry, digital competitors are taking advantage of new platforms, tools, and relationships to undercut rivals, get closer to customers, and disrupt the usual ways of doing business. The only way to compete is to evolve. James McQuivey of Forrester Research has been teaching people how to do this for more than a decade. He’s gone into the biggest companies, even in traditional industries like insurance and consumer packaged goods, and changed the way they think about innovation.

Unlike most academic books that merely define research, The Refractive Thinker® series offers unique application of effective business practices from the perspective of multiple authors – each offering a chapter based on their scholarly expertise. The Refractive Thinker® series provides doctoral scholars with a collaborative opportunity to promote and publish their work in an award winning peer-reviewed publication, which meets the university standard. Our goal is to provide an affordable outlet for scholars that supports the tremendous need for dynamic dialogue and innovation while ...

Johannes Gutenberg was our first geek, the original technology entrepreneur, who had to grapple with all the challenges a Silicon Valley startup faces today. Jeff Jarvis tells Gutenberg's story from an entrepreneurial perspective, examining how he overcame technology hurdles, how he operated with the secrecy of a Steve Jobs, but then shifted to openness, how he raised capital and mitigated risk, and how, in the end, his cash flow and equity structure did him in.

Part philosophy, part business, and part history, this book is a kaleidoscopic view of the way humans have been able to achieve greatness for themselves, their organizations, and the world at large. You'll learn from the wisdom of Eastern philosophies that are over 2,500 years old and the interconnected insights of Leonardo da Vinci. Couple that with Fortune 100 corporate cross pollination for creativity and startup thinking for how to adapt with ease, and you have Everything Connects. This isn't just a quick fix for your next quarter; this is how you succeed in the long run.

Tamara Ghandour, author, podcaster, keynote speaker and founder of innovation training company LaunchStreet, used to believe that innovation was the domain of a select few, exclusive to certain industries or relegated to a specific job role. But, as Tamara discovered in her 25 years of work and research, everybody has the capacity to innovate. It's a person's unique innovation style, which can be assessed and channelled, that can transform inertia into innovation.