For Further Reading
Altshuller, Genrich; Lev Shulyak, translator. And Suddenly the Inventor Appeared: TRIZ, the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, 2nd edition. Worcester, MA: Technical Innovation Center, Inc., 1996. Altshuller’s take on how to become an inventor and how to solve technical problems.
Csikszentmihályi, Mihály. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: Harper Collins, 1996. Csikszentmihályi focuses on the creativity of exceptional people—the paradoxical traits they possess and the unique aspects of their development over the life cycle—but he also suggests ways for enhancing creativity in everyday life.
Davis, Howard, and Richard Scase. Managing Creativity: The Dynamics of Work and Organization. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 2001. The creative industries are a growing economic as well as cultural force. This book investigates their organizational dynamics and shows how companies structure their work processes to incorporate creative employees’ needs for autonomy while at the same time controlling and coordinating their output.
Florida, Richard, and Jim Goodnight. “Managing for Creativity.” Harvard Business Review OnPoint Enhanced Edition. Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2007. How do you accommodate the complex and chaotic nature of the creative process while increasing efficiency, improving quality, and raising productivity? Most businesses haven’t figured this out. A notable exception is SAS Institute, the world’s largest privately held software company. SAS has learned how to harness the creative energies of all its stakeholders, including its customers, software developers, managers, and support staff. Its framework for managing creativity rests on three guiding principles. First, help employees do their best work by keeping them intellectually engaged and by removing distractions. Second, make managers responsible for sparking creativity and eliminate arbitrary distinctions between “suits” and “creatives.” And third, engage customers as creative partners so you can deliver superior products.
Harvard Business School Publishing. Continuous Innovation: No Genius Required . Harvard Business Review OnPoint Collection. Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2001. This Harvard Business Review OnPoint Collection shows you how to approach innovation by systematically: (1) generating new possibilities through applying old, proven ideas to new situations; (2) gathering additional ideas by identifying and learning from individuals and companies well ahead of market trends; and (3) testing the merits of those ideas through rapid, inexpensive experimentation.
Harvard Business School Publishing. “Debriefing Luc de Brabandere: Boost Your Company’s Creativity.” Harvard Management Update, April 2006. Today, popular tastes mutate constantly and technologies advance at a blistering pace. Businesses must continually innovate to keep up. But leaders who can’t detect and respond to rumblings of change—that is, who can’t be creative—stand little chance of generating these innovations. The key to creativity, according to Luc de Brabandere, a partner in The Boston Consulting Group, is learning to articulate and change the stereotypes that limit us. In this debriefing, he outlines four rules managers can follow to circumvent these blocks and hone creative powers.
Harvard Business School Publishing. Harvard Business Review on Breakthrough Thinking. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999. This collection of Harvard Business Review articles highlights leading ideas for incorporating the power of creativity into your strategic outlook.
Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. “The Middle Manager as Innovator.” Harvard Business Review OnPoint Enhanced Edition. Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2001. Kanter’s study of 165 effective middle managers in five leading corporations explores creative managerial contributions and the conditions that stimulate innovation. This article points out that enterprising, entrepreneurial middle managers share a number of characteristics: comfort with change, clarity of direction, thoroughness, a participative management style, as well as persuasiveness, persistence, and discretion.
Katz, Ralph, editor. The Human Side of Managing Technological Innovation, 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. This collection of articles hits all the bases that a manager of innovation must understand, such as how to motivate R&D professionals and how to manage innovative groups, project teams, and organizational projects. It’s a handy reference for the important people part of innovation.
Kim, W. Chan and Renée Mauborgne, “Knowing a Winning Idea When You See One,” Harvard Business Review, September-October 2000. Identifying which business ideas have real commercial potential is fraught with uncertainty. This article introduces three tools that managers can use to help strip away some of that uncertainty. The first is the buyer utility map (described in chapter 3 of this book). The second, the price corridor of the mass, identifies what price will unlock the greatest number of customers. The third, the business model guide, offers a framework for figuring out whether and how a company can profitably deliver the new idea at the targeted price.
Laduke, Patty, Tom Andrews, and Keith Yamashita. “Igniting a Passion for Innovation.” Strategy & Innovation, July-August 2003. Innovation isn’t simply about a great new thing; it often requires change, and change encounters barriers—some quite powerful. These authors describe how innovators can overcome those barriers by explaining both the why and what: a compelling purpose for an innovation (the why) that speaks to both the hearts and minds of one’s audience is often the key to success.
Leifer, Richard, Christopher M. McDermott, Gina Colarelli O’Connor, Lois S. Peters, Mark Rice, and Robert W. Veryzer. Radical Innovation: How Mature Companies Can Outsmart Upstarts. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000. This book reveals the patterns through which game-changing innovation occurs in large, established companies, and identifies the new managerial competencies firms need to make radical innovation happen. The authors, experts in a variety of areas such as entrepreneurship, R&D management, product design, marketing, organizational behavior, and operations and project management, distill a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach to mastering each of these challenges, from the conceptualization of viable ideas to the commercialization of radical innovations.
Leonard, Dorothy, and Walter Swap. When Sparks Fly: Igniting Creativity in Groups. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999. Where do the best creative ideas come from? Most managers assume that it’s the readily identifiable “creative types” that offer the quickest route to out-of-the-box, breakthrough thinking, and if you don’t have an eccentric genius on your team, your group is doomed to mediocrity. Yet, say Leonard and Swap, most innovations today spring from well-led group interactions. In this book, the authors reveal that any group—if designed and managed effectively—can produce more innovative services, products, and processes. Unlike most books on creativity, When Sparks Fly focuses on the process as it applies to groups of people who may not fit the stereotype of right-brained “creatives.” Leonard and Swap offer managers strategies for generating the group dynamics that lie at the heart of innovative thinking, including specific techniques for rechanneling the tensions of conflicting points of view into new ideas and alternative options. When Sparks Fly explores how all aspects of the work environment, from leadership style to the use of space, sound, even smell, can enhance innovation.
Levitt, Theodore. “Creativity Is Not Enough,” Harvard Business Review OnPoint Enhanced Edition. Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2002. Creativity is often touted as a miraculous road to organizational growth and affluence. But creative new ideas can hinder rather than help a company if they are put forward irresponsibly. In this article, the author, a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School offers suggestions for the person with a great new idea. First, work with the situation as it is—recognize that the executive is already bombarded with problems. Second, act responsibly by including in your proposal at least a minimal indication of the costs, risks, manpower, and time your idea may involve.
Michalko, Michael. Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 1998. Michalko divides the topic into two sections—seeing what no one else sees and thinking what no one else is thinking—and provides concrete examples, strategies, and exercises for each. For example, strategies for novel thinking include connecting the unconnected, looking at the other side, and finding what you’re not looking for.
Robinson, Alan G., and Sam Stern. Corporate Creativity. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1997. An in-depth analysis of six elements that make for creativity in the work environment: alignment, self-initiated activity, unofficial activity, serendipity, diverse stimuli, and in-company communication.
Skarzynski, Peter, and Rowan Gibson. Innovation to the Core: A Blueprint for Transforming the Way Your Company Innovates. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2008. Peter Skarzynski and business strategist Rowan Gibson share the accumulated wisdom from Strategos—the consulting firm founded by Gary Hamel and led by Skarzynski that helps clients instill innovation into their very core. Drawing on a wealth of stories and examples, the book shows how companies of every stripe have overcome the barriers to successful, profitable innovation. Readers will find parts devoted to crucial topics, such as how to organize the discovery process, generate strategic insights, enlarge the innovation pipeline, and maximize return on innovation. Frameworks, checklists, and probing questions help put the book’s ideas into action.
Sutton, Robert I. Weird Ideas That Work. New York: Free Press, 2002. The title says it all. This Stanford professor builds a convincing case for why the standard rules of business management suffocate innovation. In their place he offers unconventional ways to promote and enhance creativity, many of them counterintuitive. He discusses new approaches to hiring, managing creative people, and dealing with risk and randomness in innovation. These practices succeed, he believes, because they increase the range of a company’s knowledge, allow people to see old problems in new ways, and help companies break from the past.
Utterback, James M. Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1994. This work by a noted scholar provides a practical model for business leaders striving to innovate. It anticipated by many years some of the ideas popularized by Clayton Christensen and others. The author draws from historical cases of innovation to illustrate how an innovation enters an industry, how mainstream firms typically respond, and how new and old players wrestle for dominance. He documents the pace of innovation, showing how a wave of process innovation often follows in the footsteps of product innovations that have preceded it. Of special interest is Utterback’s notion of the “dominant design,” and how such a design gradually evolves from the great variety that often characterizes the early years of ferment associated with the market introduction of new-to-the-world products.
Von Hippel, Eric. Democratizing Innovation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Improvements in computer and communications technology are giving users opportunities to develop or improve their own products and services, and to share what they’ve learned with others—including product companies. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to better tap the knowledge and insights of customers and potential adopters of new products and services.
_____ . The Sources of Innovation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. This book presents studies showing that end-users, material suppliers, and others—and not always manufacturers—are the typical sources of innovation in some fields. These findings suggest that R&D people search out lead users as sources of innovative ideas.
Zelinski, Ernie J. The Joy of Thinking Big. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 1998. This book lacks a cohesive conceptual framework, but its strength lies in the dozens of hands-on tips and strategies for individuals that get at the heart of the creative paradox. Sample topics include how to develop a great memory for forgetting, how to fail successfully, and how to be a creative loafer.