Product Description: The Harvard Business Review Paperback Series is designed to bring today's managers and professionals the fundamental information they need to stay competitive in a fast-moving world. From the preeminent thinkers whose work has defined an entire field to the rising stars who will redefine the way we think about business, here are the leading minds and landmark ideas that have established the Harvard Business Review as required reading for ambitious businesspeople in organizations around the globe.
In today's ever-changing economic landscape, innovation has become even more of a key factor influencing strategic planning. This comprehensive volume will help the reader recognize and seize innovation opportunities.
Innovation Expression that cannot be matched. I was pleasantly surprised at the ease of reading this book. Each patr is beautifully orientated with outstanding diagrams and notes. The ideas expressed within are quick to collect and rapidly absorbed and understood. A great 3-4 hour read that will set your innovation engines on fire!
Good Collection of Articles With a good collection of articles and case studies, the book helps us to recognize and seize innovation opportunities. I certainly recommend this book for executives. Another one that I recommend is Eightstorm: 8-Step Brainstorming for Innovative Managers.
Fair I found little of interest in these articles. I would start in any number of other books if you are interested in innovation.
another book of cute little bits and pieces--where is the forest? First, I apologize for the mixed metaphor in the title above.
Second, all the articles in this collection are "good".
Third, however, you may, as I, be more than a little tired of academics from the world's greatest universities, for decades, on topics like innovation, publishing little bits and pieces.
Fourth, I recently bought 200 books with innovation or its synonyms in their titles or blurb descriptions, grouped them in groups, and ordered books from best to junk within each group. Then I surveyed the whole thing asking myself "what, overall, are all the theories of innovation that are out there and which of them have been tested?"
It turns out there are 27 theories of innovation out there and none of them have been tested, as a whole theory, but bits, extremely small bits, of some of them have been nibbled at by the world's greatest academics from the world's greatest universities. I counted full coverage of NONE of these 27 approaches to innovation, in this particular book. NONE. What is in this book is nibbles of two of the 27--wowie!!! Harvard has nibbled 2 of 27 theories around on innovation--what a powerful research effort! I am sooooo impressed. My friend in Reuters just emailed me complaining how naive I am--professors do not do comprehensive things because they hate the good ideas of their competitors! I am naive. I thought professionals learned to respect and admire the good ideas of their peers and competitors--I am too naive!
Conclusion: if you want some more little bits about innovation, here is another, one of a series of 200 books presenting disconnected little bits about innovation. If you want, however, more what the world's best scholars should be capable of--that is, a comprehensive, thorough survey of all the theories and approaches to innovation in our world, ordered, analyzed, compared, and made sense of, so you have both a mental feel and a practical repertoire of the diversity in doing innovation there to be tried, then this book will sorely disappoint you, not only in its contents but also in the quality of mind that today gets tenure at the "world's best universities".
If these are the world's best minds on innovation--then we live in a more pitiable world than I ever imagined before. Pity us, poor pitiful us!
Honestly, I cannot fault these guys for their bits--each little tiny bit article is cute, nice in its own way, and impressive sounding. However, when I add them all up, I get a sense that this book covers approximately 1/200th of innovation overall. Why string us readers out and make us buy 200 books like this before we get a thorough, grounded, comprehensive, useful overview of all the theories of and approaches to innovating around? I am tired of bits and pieces. I am a little angry at the "world's best professors" from the "world's best universities" stringing me and millions of others along with bits and pieces. Without a forest and a deep thorough understanding of a forest, interest in any one tree is not only unwise, but in real markets run by real people, quite dangerous. The bit of innovation you got from this sort of book and masterfully applied gets run over by 19 other bits, not in this book, that you never heard of till they mashed your project/company. This is not myth--it happened to three global corporations I managed. Bits are dangerous--however clever they make their authors, for a tiny moment, look. I am no longer able to develop any enthusiasm for them.
I could review each bit in this book but to tell you the truth, it does not matter what the bits in this book are--they are all so very very tiny and bit-sized, isolated and cute, that you know, as you read each article, there are 1000s of similar bits in similar books out there. You can sell an awful lot of books this way without conveying a useable understanding of a field like "innovation". Derek Bok, in his earlier incarnation as head of Harvard used to declaim in books on higher education how professors are so very very very narrow and how what they publish is so very very very sliverish in journals that are so very very very unread. I love every five years or so when the Academy of Management journals and reviews get a new editor, to read his/her article declaiming, with the subtlest whimper in his/her tone, how "nobody reads all this great research we publish". They do not read it because it is "bits and pieces".
This book is "great" by the criteria of modern "torture assistant professors for 7 years" American-esque academics--but by the criteria of people like me trying to get 10,000 people to stop being bureaucratic and do what they must do to survive Chinese and other competition, these bits are increasingly useless, cute, and decorative. I do not look forward to the next bits from any of these authors. I fear their entire lives will be consumed in bit-ness. If I read books like this, my own life will be thusly consumed. These professor guys need to do some work, stop publishing the smallest fastest possible bit, and COVER a topic not nibble it. We need people with heftier minds in these pompous over priced elitist universities our media worship.
If you want to know the kind of book I like on innovation--try Van de Ven's Minnesota Studies on Innovation (not the exact title--a big black covered book of about 800 pages). That whole body of longitudinal work following a dozen innovations through 20 years of ups and downs dwarfs what you learn from these cute little assistant-professor style bits and pieces books. It is statistically much better and more powerfully grounded, the research questions are framed profoundly not opportunistically for tenure, and the richness of real lived history of each followed innovation undoes nearly all that cute little assistant-professor books by authors like these, says.
Good reading Well written and presented with interesting examples/case studies. Definitely worth a read.
Am not an expert in the subject area but some of the concepts did appear dated or jaded to me.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
