Innovation Strategy

Leaders already know that innovation calls for a different set of activities, skills, methods, metrics, mind-sets, and leadership approaches. And it is well understood that creating a new business and optimizing an already existing one are two fundamentally different management challenges. The real problem for leaders is doing both simultaneously. How do you meet the performance requirements of the existing business-one that is still thriving-while dramatically reinventing it?

How well does your organization respond to changing market conditions, customer needs, and emerging technologies when building software-based products? This practical guide presents Lean and Agile principles and patterns to help you move fast at scale - and demonstrates why and how to apply these methodologies throughout your organization. Through case studies, you'll learn how successful enterprises have rethought everything from governance and financial management to systems architecture and organizational culture in the pursuit of radically improved performance.

Every day major headlines tell the story of a new and better American marketplace. Established corporations have begun reevaluating the quality of their products, the ethics of their supply chains, and how they can give back by donating portions of their profits to meaningful causes. Meanwhile millions of entrepreneurs who want a more responsible and compassionate marketplace have launched a new breed of socially focused business models.

We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the best ones to help you toggle between long- and short-term views, manage risk and innovation, and cultivate productive relationships with your staff and your board. This book will inspire you to: navigate the changing global business environment.

How can great companies do everything right - identify real customer needs, deliver excellent innovations, beat their competitors to market - and still fail? The sad truth is that many companies fail because they focus too intensely on their own innovations, and then neglect the innovation ecosystems on which their success depends. In our increasingly interdependent world, winning requires more than just delivering on your own promises. It means ensuring that a host of partners - some visible, some hidden - deliver on their promises, too.

In this book, Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch reveal the emergence of connected strategies as a new source of competitive advantage. With in-depth examples from companies operating in various industries, Connected Strategy identifies the four pathways - respond-to-desire, curated offering, coach behavior, and automatic execution - for turning episodic interactions into continuous relationships. The authors show how each pathway creates a competitive advantage, then guide you through the critical decisions for creating and implementing your own connected strategies.

This is the first book to present innovation and entrepreneurship as a purposeful and systematic discipline. It clearly explains and analyzes the challenges and opportunities of America's new entrepreneurial economy. Peter Drucker, the most influential and widely-read thinker and writer on modern organizations, gives us a superbly practical book that explains what established businesses, public service institutions, and new ventures have to know, have to learn, and have to do in today's economy and marketplace.

50 Business Classics presents the key ideas from classic texts such as My Years with General Motors and Michael Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited to contemporary business lessons from the rise of tech giants like Google, Apple, and Amazon. It contains revealing biographies of luminaries like Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett, as well as lesser-known stories including creation of publishing giant Penguin and Chinese behemoth Alibaba.

Learning to SOAR (formerly titled: Thin Book of SOAR) is about a generative approach to strategic thinking, planning, and leading that invites any person at any level in an organization to create strategy and strategic plans through shared conversations, collaboration, and a commitment to action. SOAR stands for: strengths, opportunities, aspirations, and results. SOAR is a flexible framework and builds on the Appreciative Inquiry philosophy to provide a strategic dialogue process. Examples are provided on how to use SOAR at different organizational levels from individual coaching to teams,...

IDEO, the widely admired, award-winning design and development firm that brought the world the Apple mouse, Polaroid's I-Zone instant camera, the Palm V, and hundreds of other cutting-edge products and services, reveals its secrets for fostering a culture and process of continuous innovation.

Written by the executive who designed and implemented it, the neuroscientist who helped make it work, and the academic who explains why it works and how to do it, Leading Transformation introduces an innovative yet proven process for creating breakthrough change.

Innovation expert Marion Debruyne explains how to become an outside-in organization by constantly connecting with the market to anticipate changes, converting customer insights into actionable change and collaborating with others where their own capabilities fall short. Packed with real world examples from leading global companies, Customer Innovation provides the framework needed to shift from a product-oriented to a solutions-oriented focus and from a transaction-based to a co-creation-based customer relationship.

In Fusion Strategy, world-renowned innovation guru Vijay Govindarajan and digital strategy expert Venkat Venkataraman offer a first-of-its-kind playbook that will help industrial companies combine what they do best-create physical products-with what digitals do best-use algorithms and AI to parse expansive, interconnected datasets-to make strategic connections that would otherwise be impossible.

A trio of experts on high-tech business strategy and innovation reveal the principles that have made platform businesses the most valuable firms in the world and the first trillion-dollar companies.

How much of innovation is inspiration, and how much is hard work? The answer lies somewhere in the middle, says management thinker Peter Drucker. In this HBR classic from 1985, he argues that innovation is real work that can and should be managed like any other corporate function. Success is more likely to result from the systematic pursuit of opportunities than from a flash of genius. Indeed, most innovative business ideas arise through the methodical analysis of seven areas of opportunity.

Our Iceberg Is Melting is a simple fable about doing well in an ever-changing world. Based on the award-winning work of Harvard's John Kotter, it is a story that has been used to help thousands of people and organizations. The fable is about a penguin colony in Antarctica. A group of beautiful emperor penguins live as they have for many years. Then one curious bird discovers a potentially devastating problem threatening their home - and pretty much no one listens to him.

Why are some organizations more innovative than others? How can we tap in to, empower, and leverage the natural innovation within our organizations that is so vital to our future success? Now more than ever, companies and institutions of all types and sizes are determined to create more innovative organizations. In study after study, leaders say that fostering innovation and the need for transformational change are among their top priorities.

Each year, Americans start one million new businesses, nearly 80 percent of which fail within the first five years. Under such pressure to stay alive—let alone grow—it’s easy for entrepreneurs to get caught up in a never-ending cycle of "sell it—do it, sell it—do it" that leaves them exhausted, frustrated, and unable to get ahead no matter how hard they try. Full of stories of other successful entrepreneurs, The Pumpkin Plan guides you through unconven­tional strategies to help you build a truly profitable blue-ribbon company that is the best in its field.

Peter Senge's groundbreaking ideas on building organizations have made him a household name among corporate managers. His theories help businesses to clarify their goals, to defy the odds, to more clearly understand threats, and to recognize new opportunities. He introduces managers to a new source of competitive advantage, and offers a marvelously empowering approach to work.

What do people and businesses need to know about the realities of innovating in order to develop products successfully? Lorraine Marchand—a seasoned practitioner who has guided Fortune 500 companies and start-ups on developing and launching new ideas—lays out a step-by-step framework for spurring success. She shares her eight laws of innovation, a formula for driving significant and lasting transformation in any organization. Marchand emphasizes the frame of mind needed to spark the innovation process.