Practical Innovation (Strategies and frameworks to improve innovation performance in organizations)

ABOUT THE BOOK: Practical Innovation is a collection of strategies and frameworks gathered from the author's experience over many years of teaching executive development programs, graduate programs, and consulting with managers. It makes innovation practical by giving readers a set of tools they can use to improve innovation performance in their organizations. Straightforward steps and real life examples are used to show how to design a strategy that works for you and your organization. OVERVIEW / PREFACE: Innovation is the lifeblood of organizations, as the cliché goes. While many organizations believe this cliché, and would like to stay abreast of innovations in their domain, many do not actually do anything about it. This may be due to the lack of will, or it may be that they do not know how to go about making innovation happen. Innovation is typically thought of as an abstract concept, the domain of blue-sky thinkers, nerdy engineers, the Einsteins, the Galileos, and the many geniuses that have, to their credit, invented multiple concepts and objects on which a lot of other new inventions and technologies are based. However, innovation need not be restricted to such domains and people. The primary goal of this book is to demystify the concept of innovation, to break it down and make it easy to understand and implementable so that everyday people will find that it may not be that onerous to innovate. This book is about making innovation practical. It combines theory with practice. Other books are either too theoretical or too practical. This book attempts to operationalize concepts and theories, to make them practical for simple comprehension and applicability by the reader. It introduces many frameworks the output of research describing and explaining them in simple ways. More importantly, it explains in very practical ways how managers and practitioners can improve innovation performance in their organizations. Where appropriate, the book offers relevant examples. Thus, the reader will be equipped with and understand what specific tool to pull and for what purpose. The reader will be equipped like a technician who possesses a tool box with many different tools for different purposes. When the technician encounters any problem, he or she just searches from within the toolbox and pulls the right tool to handle the job. Practical Innovation is a collection of research ideas, gathered from the author s experience over many years of teaching executive development programs and graduate programs and consulting with managers. The book provides a plethora of tools and frameworks for handling innovation-related issues. It specifies what frameworks to use for what purpose, how to use them, and when. The ideas are presented in an easy-to-read format with useful and practical examples and frameworks. This book is targeted at a wide variety of audience, including leaders and practicing managers in any industry or organizations that have a need for innovation, graduate students in management and business disciplines, and any individual or professional that is interested in understanding the topic of innovation.