Praise for Strategic Innovation
“This book makes an important contribution to new thinking about products and markets that do not yet exist. We know that strategies that worked in the previous industry transformation rarely work in the next one. This book shows the companies and strategies that will build the future.”
—Jouko Ahvenainen, Chairman and Founder, Grow VC Group
“Anyone can spot a winner with hindsight. As readers of business literature we eagerly follow the mainstream in digesting retrospective tales of excellence from proven performers. This book attempts to beat the crowd in turning to accounts of promising outliers in the midst of white heat emergence where performance outcomes are still undefined. That’s interesting! It is delivered through a varied set of rich cases, written from multiple vantage points with also external commentators. The prose that binds it all together is fresh, witty, and full of zest. Yeah! Wow! Oomph!”
—Professor Arne Carlsen, BI Norwegian Business School
“Getting past the conventional wisdom is critical and this important new work shows how to use strategic novelty to challenge your thinking.”
—Bill Guns, CEO, Strategic Business Insights
“From Silicon Valley to Scandinavia and practically everywhere in between, Liisa Välikangas is a pioneer in the realm of studying, supporting, and identifying early-stage innovations across sectors. The collection of authors that she has gathered here represents an incredible cross-section of perspectives on innovation around the world, and offer an illuminating view into the frequently misunderstood world of innovations in both technology and social practice.”
—David Evan Harris, Research Director, Institute for the Future
“Competitive environment is increasingly not only complicated but complex. Linear, accepted, strategies of the past, which might have worked in complicated-only competition, no longer work. This book gives vanguard thoughts on how to build strategic novelty to paddle the chaotic flow of the new-complex-environment.”
—Jussi Jaakonaho, Software Integrity Group, Synopsys Inc.; Toolcrypt Group and Former Chief Advisor, Enterprise Risk and Security for Nokia.
“This book reveals the importance of spotting outliers while their radically creative business models and practices represent opportunities, before they become mainstream when everyone, including your competitors, is copying them.”
—Soren Kaplan, best-selling author of Leapfrogging, and founder of InnovationPoint
“An intriguing selection of companies that may help shape the future.”
—Roland Kupers, University of Oxford and co-author of Complexity and the Art of Public Policy
“This book addresses an important topic—the study of outliers—that is long due.”
—Professor Arie Lewin, Duke University
“Strategic Innovation is a thought-provoking book about the quiddity of outlier organizations. The authors have a razor-sharp eye for the hidden markers that reveal strategic novelty as it unfolds. In this book, the authors introduce a methodology that unravels the concept of prediction outliers: how uniquely different companies with unconventional business models have lingering, staggering, and industry-wide effects. As in her previous writings, Ms Välikangas once again contributes a nuanced and insightful outlook for understanding effective business innovation.”
—Claudia Medina, Consultant in learning technologies
“Learning from outliers is THE challenge of the 21st century. Not because today is more complex than yesterday or tomorrow, but because right now we want to embrace diversity, anchor resilience in diversification, and find ways to align our capabilities to our aspirations for freedom. As the authors of this important book argue, the capacity to appreciate strategic novelty requires sense making that goes beyond the search for averages and the aggregation of common denominator statistics that obscure and ignore outliers. Getting better at learning from outliers is essential if humanity wants to take advantage of the richness of complex emergence.”
—Riel Miller, former Head of Foresight, UNESCO
“In a world of accelerating change and opportunity, innovation matters more than ever. Yet the greatest potential for disruption lies not in new products and services, but in models that challenge how business is done. That’s why learning from outliers to build strategic novelty is the next big management methodology—and mindset.”
—Nancy R. Murphy, Director of Experience Design and Communications, Worldview Stanford
“Strategic Innovation delivers on three important promises: a fresh view of innovation ‘before’ it is obvious, a deep focus on organizations and business model innovation as the key focus, and a series of actionable steps to identify and implement on such ‘strategic novelty’ in your firm or agency. Great insights, excellent and varied case examples, and realistic ‘what to do now’.”
—Marc J Ventresca, Strategy and Innovation faculty, University of Oxford and Wolfson College
“A refreshing new look at how you can learn from the outliers who are pushing envelope on new business models. Read this book and you will never look at strategy the same way again!”
—Peter Williamson, Professor, International Management, University of Cambridge