Every organization needs a basket of tools and methods to help find innovative ideas and solutions. Give access to the right tools to the right people based on the nature of their jobs and the types of challenges that needs to be solved. Surround them with proper innovation management processes, and the tools will help generate a culture of innovation and new profits. We are happy to share three of our favorite books on innovation tools.

	The Big Book of Creativity Games: Quick, Fun Activities for Jumpstarting Innovation by Robert Epstein In the modern economy, where most workers are knowledge workers, creativity and innovation are the most easily sustainable competitive advantages. In The Big Book of Creativity Games, Harvard trained psychologist Robert Epstein provides dozens of games and activities designed to stimulate creativity and generate innovation in the workplace. Dr. Epstein describes the scientific principles of creativity that underlie the games, and how these principles can be applied to tasks like problem solving, new product development, and marketing. Timely and innovative, The Big Book of Creativity Games is the ideal book for managers to turn to whenever they need: Games that are easy to lead and fun to play Exercises that go far beyond standard brainstorming techniques Innovation jump-starters for team meetings and work groups
	Fast Creativity & Innovation: Rapidly Improving Processes, Product Development and Solving by Charles W. Bytheway  Function Analysis Systems Technique (FAST) is a powerful mapping technique that can graphically represent goals, objectives, strategies, plans, projects, processes, and procedures in function terms to identify related dependencies by organizing them into a cause-and-effect relationship. It is used as a tool to enhance productive thinking, innovation, creativity, and complex problem-solving by allowing problems to be represented quickly and clearly. "Fast Creativity & Innovation" explores all the original concepts behind the FAST method with examples from all sorts of disciplines and industries, as well as looking at some of the newer derivatives of the method - such as fishbone diagrams and process mapping - and how they can be re-introduced to the original concept to tap into undiscovered opportunities for success.
	The Rudolph Factor: Finding the Bright Lights that Drive Innovation in Your Business by Cyndi Laurin & Craig Morningstar  Praise for The Rudolph Factor "Whether you're just starting a business or are a seasoned veteran, The Rudolph Factor provides the guiding light for continuously stimulating innovation. People are the key, and this is just the recipe for waking up the creative power within!"

The Takeaway

Innovation is an ever-evolving discipline.  Many practitioners and academics have invented and popularized many tools to help you accelerate your innovation efforts.

Over to you.  Please comment below.

1. What other books would you add to the recommended reading list?
2. What is your favorite innovation tool?
3. In what area of innovation would you like to see new tools created?

In my experience, all ideas come from an emotion of creativity. Many ideas are easy to find.  However, the breakthrough ideas need staff that is challenged to solve the greatest problems Books in this category will help you identify the problem space as well as solution space by tapping into the hearts and minds of your people.              

	Managing Creativity and Innovation (Harvard Business Essentials)  Packed with practical information designed for business readers and managers at all levels, this essential volume offers insights on managing creativity in groups, developing creative conflict, and using technology to help foster innovation.
	Think Better: An Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinking by TimHurson   There are thousands of books about thinking. But there are very few books that provide clear how-to information that can actually help you think better. Think Better is about Productive Thinking - why it's important, how it works, and how to use it at work, at home, and at play. Productive Thinking is a game changer - a practical, easy-to-learn, repeatable process that helps people understand more clearly, think more creatively, and plan more effectively. It's based on the thinking strategies that people we celebrate for their creativity have been using for centuries. Tim Hurson brings Productive Thinking out of the closet and presents it in a way that makes it easy for anyone to grasp and use - so you can think better, work better, and do better in every aspect of your life. Think Better demonstrates how you can start with an intractable technical problem, an unmet consumer need, or a gaping chasm in your business strategy and, by following a clearly defined, practical thinking process, arrive at a robust, innovative solution. Manycompanies use the Productive Thinking model to generate fresh solutions for tough business problems, and many individuals rely on it to solve pressing personal problems.
	Creativity and Innovation in Organizational Teams Organization and Management   by Hoon-Seok Choi Leigh L. Thompson  Creativity and Innovation in Organizational Teams stemmed from a conference held at the Kellogg School of Management in June 2003 covering creativity and innovation in groups and organizations. Each chapter of the book is written by an expert and covers original theory about creative processes in organizations. The organization of the text reflects a longstanding notion that creativity in the world of work is a joint outcome of three interdependent forces--individual thinking, group processes, and organizational environment. Part I explores basic cognitive mechanisms that underlie creative thinking, and includes chapters that discuss cognitive foundations of creativity, a cognitive network model of creativity that explains how and why creative solutions form in the human mind, and imports a ground-breaking concept of "creativity templates" to the study of creative idea generation in negotiation context. The second part is devoted to understanding how groups and teams in organizational settings produce creative ideas and implement innovations. Finally, Part III contains three chapters that discuss the role of social, organizational context in which creative endeavors take place. The book has a strong international mix of scholarship and includes clear business implications based on scientific research. It weds the disciplines of psychology, cognition, and business theory into one text.
	The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO's Strategies for Defeating the Devil's Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization by Thomas Kelley and Jonathan Littman  The author of the bestselling The Art of Innovation reveals the strategies IDEO, the world-famous design firm, uses to foster innovative thinking throughout an organization and overcome the naysayers who stifle creativity.  The role of the devil's advocate is nearly universal in business today. It allows individuals to step outside themselves and raise questions and concerns that effectively kill new projects and ideas, while claiming no personal responsibility. Nothing is more potent in stifling innovation.
	Leadership for Innovation: How to Organize Team Creativity and Harvest Ideas by John Eric Adair  New ideas and new ways of doing things are one of the main ingredients in sustained business success, but how does one create the right conditions for innovation? Leadership for Innovation will help readers create an innovative climate that encourages the development of new products and services. Drawing upon real-life examples including Google, Honda and 3M, John Adair sets out practical ways for bringing about change in organizations. As well as identifying the characteristics of an innovative organization, he discusses key topics such as organizing for team creativity; motivating creative people, how to build on ideas and how to be a creative leader and team member. Leadership for Innovation shows how to inspire teams to go one step further and generate the kind of ideas that are the foundations of future success.
	CATS: The Nine Lives of Innovation by Stephen C. Lundin It's time to let the CATS out of the bag . . . Curiosity might have killed the proverbial cat, but without it very real achievements would never occur. With this book as your guide, you'll learn how to spark your innate curiosity, pounce on problems in ways you never imagined, and enjoy greater success and satisfaction at work-and in your personal life. Playful, profound, and positively upbeat, CATS provides what you need to tap into your power of innovation-and then unleash it in every member of your organization. While most business thinkers view this challenge from the top down, Stephen Lundin sees the subject from a CAT's-eye view, explaining how to get every employee--no matter what level--to think and act in innovative ways. Inside, he examines the four challenges to innovation and offers practical measures aimed at conquering them.

The Takeaway

Challenge your staff to think creatively about customer needs in new and unique ways.

Your Turn.  Please comment below.

1. What creativity and innovation books would you add to the list?
2. Which of the books on the list did you enjoy the most?
3. If only one book could be written on Creativity and Innovation what should its focus  be?

STATEMENTS YOU SHOULD CONSIDER

1. Innovation is bringing heart into work.
2. Nucleus of innovation is tapping into people's hearts.
3. Innovators have a thirst for knowledge.
4. Waiters wait, managers manage, innovators create value.
5. A rhythm for growth - harvesting a cultural balance between performance (left brain) and exploration (right brain).
6. Your Innovation Goal should be measurable, customer focused and capable of delivering value.
7. Organizations must complement the operational performance mind-set with the innovation execution mind-set.
8. To achieve sustainable growth companies must better integrate product innovation with process and service innovation.
9. Evolve your mechanistic, bureaucratic and hierarchical practices model towards an innovation-driven executionmodel .
10. New value creation - innovate to generate differentiated new value and profit.
11. Once you are ready to play the game of innovation, you will need an Innovation Scorecard.
12. Create a business case for innovation and supporting innovation strategy linked to business vision and goals.
13. Build a pipeline of corporate innovators -- the key talent for future growth (intrapreneurs).
14. The average life span of companies on the S&P 500 has shrunk from 75 years in 1930s to just 15 years in 2000s.
15. Innovation can build continuous new S-Curves for your organization.
16. Without engaged employees, sustainable innovation is not possible.
17. Without continuous failure there is no continuous innovation or evolution.
18. Most managers are very likely to mobilize an idea if they have 80% clarity about it.
19. Innovation Intent is easier to identify if the senior team has already declared its strategic intent.
20. Rampant commoditization and disorder suggests that old methods of diagnosing growth challenges have been wrong.
21. Globalization and Automation are causing a shortened life span for products and services.
22. Innovation, if done right, should be an input to strategic planning, not an outcome.
23. Optimize your innovation engine on the innovation highway - alignment, insights and mobilization are key.
24. To begin your innovation journey, leaders in your company must take time to develop the innovation strategy.
25. Sustainable competitive advantage necessitates sustained new innovations.
26. Build your Innovation Engine to accelerate exploitation of new business ideas worthy of pursuing.
27. Build your Innovation Engine to improve employee attraction, engagement and retention.

The Takeaway

Regularly re-consider your beliefs about succeeding at the game of innovation by challenging yourself. 

Over to you.   Please comment below.

1. What other tweet length questions should we ask about Innovation?
2. What other tweet length statements should we challenge ourselves with on a regular basis?
3. What is your best advice on Innovation in 140 characters or less?

Pharmaceuticals is an industry that impacts each one of us. Due to the highly regulated environment, it is difficult to easily drive product innovations. 

Four Focus Areas for Industry Innovation

Therefore, Pharma must focus on 1) business model innovations, 2) process innovations, 3) delivery innovations, and 4) customer experience innovations.  

Let's take a look at how a $26 Billion company with 30,000 employees, in 24 countries based in U.S.  

Client Situation:

The client, a leading pharmaceutical company with international operations, was faced with a growth gap, having experienced several years of flat sales and heavy competition in U.S. and generics. 

The company had recently initiated a global expansion program.  However, they quickly realized that this endeavor would be limited and insufficient in meeting its future growth goals. The company's track record in organic growth and innovation was limited.

The challenge was to improve the company's innovation capacity, identify new growth opportunities, and have a showcase success within two years.  

Six Stage Approach:

1. Diagnosis: The DeSai Group diagnosed the client's current situation, past innovation successes and failures.
2. Recommendation: Based upon these findings, recommendations for enhancing the company's innovation capacity were made.
3. Ideation: Through a highly structured ideation process, DeSai and the client identified and clustered ideas into Value-Platforms.
4. Evaluation: The various Value-Platforms were created, evaluated, and prioritized.
5. Refinement: The high priority platforms were further expanded with detailed product and service value propositions.
6. Final Refinement: Six teams were formed for each platform to further build out business briefs to lead to specific business plans within six months.

Results Are The Measure of Innovation Success

How did applying the DeSai Body of Knowledge impact the company? 

• A Venture Board was established.
• Proposals were evaluated by the Venture Board composed of both internal and external members.
• Five candidate business ventures were selected having revenue potential of $350Million.
• The existing portfolio was evaluated and 25% of the ongoing projects were halted. 
• The evaluation process yielded 20% of the client's R&D resources for re-allocation.
• An Innovation Board and Innovation Process Owner were established to lead the innovation projects. 

The Takeaway

Through a climate and culture of innovation companies can continue to generate value for everyone within their stakeholder system. 

Your Turn.  Please comment below.

1. How does your organization ideate future concepts?
2. What has your experience been with Venture Boards and similar concepts?
3. In what types of Innovation does your company focus?

What are the signs of an aligned organization for innovation? When alignment is present, you will see focus and collaboration at the right levels for the purpose of achieving organizational and individual goals for both the business leaders and for individuals. True alignment will show up in the form of employees' desire to engage at work and be effective contributors to the organization, continually looking for new ways to support the overall vision, mission, and purpose of the organization as a whole. 

Alignment means that each business unit, department, team, and individual sees and understands its role and how it contributes to the overall innovation mandate of the organization. It gives them confidence that their work is valuable. 

Insights

Insights reflect the importance of discovering new ideas-with art and science rather than as matter of luck. It begins with the recognition that information from many sources is essential to developing unique insights that will allow your business to achieve strategic targets. 

To develop deep insights about what is possible, you must involve people from all levels of the organization, including partners, suppliers, customers, and regulators. The larger the field of information and ideas, the more dramatic, sustainable, and unique will be your pool of insights. Here we capture a collection of ideas and knowledge, connected or not to each other, for potential exploitation. 

Once captured, the ideas must be organized and easily shared with others so they can be enhanced; the result becomes your idea bank. You need a disciplined process to keep the idea bank alive or, like anything else, the ideas will quickly die due to inertia. 

How does a company develop this competency for deep insights? In most organizations, to gain insight into projects, market positioning, and corporate performance, they develop and study performance charts, two-by-two matrices, and Balanced Scorecards, respectively. Looking at data in such a way, we are able to develop certain forms of business insights. 

Similarly, innovation insight depends on finding (sometimes through visualization and highly diverse group exercises) new knowledge that leads to practical ideas for consideration. When executed well, insights enable creation of innovation platforms (a plethora of ideas to pursue a large multiyear business opportunity) and fresh ideas. This helps managers quickly make investment decisions to accelerate new and novel discoveries. 

What is required for an idea pipeline to get fatter and mightier? The most important is to establish climate of trust and openness that support the creative process. You will also need tools for individuals and teams to find incremental and breakthrough ideas.

Mobilization

The focus here is strictly on innovation execution. Our data show that most organizations are weakest in this area. Mobilization reflects the reality that even with strong alignment and a good flow of insights, innovation is only valuable when it is translated into results-that is, executed. The organization with the best idea is not always the winner. Rather, the organization with the ability to execute the best idea is the winner. Especially in today's competitive and fast-paced environment where maturation from unique idea to commodity is very swift, execution in the early stages of innovation is critical for success.

Mobilizing also means you must capture the maximum value of an innovation before it is duplicated, continually improving that product of service to stay ahead of the competition. Effective mobilization calls for sufficient resources; quick and effective decisions; clear thinking about the human impact of new approaches; and continuous learning about how to translate innovations into reality faster and successfully over time. 

In summary, mobilization is a set of processes, methods, tools, and structures that will allow employees and managers to operationalize ideas  for implementation and venturing in an informed way to achieve targeted business outcomes.  

Alignment + Insights + Mobilization = Success 

Alignment, insights, and mobilization are all happening at the same time. All three play critical roles in the success of innovation and therefore, the long-term sustainability of your organization. To be successful, you must manage each of them and the trade-offs between them. An idea that has great merit but would struggle to be mobilized in your organization may not be as valuable as an idea with less merit that can quickly be tested and mobilized. A fantastic idea that would be great for your consumer but does not align with your organizational purpose will struggle to receive funding and support over the long term. A great idea for the market but without strong leadership alignment will stay dormant. 

The Takeaway

As your organization builds the innovation muscle and the innovation engine continues to grow, you will need to adjust the integration points as a part of the overall business planning conversations and activities at the top. 

Your turn.  Please comment below.

Google has acquired 1,000 patents from IBM.

According to the SEO by the Sea blog, which first reported the purchase, Google bought patents that stretch across several different markets, including one for "Web-based querying" and another for the "fabrication and architecture of memory and microprocessing chips." Google's newly acquired patents also relate to servers and routers, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The price tag for the patents hasn't been publicly disclosed.

Google's acquisition of IBM's patents is a consolation prize for the search giant. Late last month, Apple, Microsoft, Research In Motion, and a few other companies announced that they had acquired 6,000 patents and patent applications from bankrupt telecom-equipment company Nortel Networks. Google had initially offered $900 million for that patent portfolio.   Read more

Source: CNET News

All PDF versions of books published by the National Academies Press are now downloadable to anyone free of charge.

 Makes All PDF Books Free to Download;
More Than 4,000 Titles Now Available Free to All Readers

This includes a current catalog of more than 4,000 books plus future reports produced by the Press. The mission of the National Academies Press (NAP) — publisher for the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council — is to disseminate the institutions’ content as widely as possible while maintaining financial sustainability. To that end, NAP began offering free content online in 1994.

Printed books will continue to be available for purchase through the NAP website and traditional channels. The free PDFs are available exclusively from NAP’s website, and remain subject to copyright laws.

Source: The National Academies Press