Books on Innovation
Books on innovation tend to fall into two broad categories: why and how innovations move from whim to wham, nothing to mainstream; and attempts at telling regular people like you and me how to be more innovative. My personal experience as a consultant is that most organizations don’t lack for innovative ideas. In fact, there are lots of them floating around. No, the issue is almost always nurturing and cultivating divergent ideas, and all the political and personal risks that go along with doing that.
With that in mind, my book selections tend to focus on how to foster innovation, vs. how to come up with out of the box ideas. Here are some of my favorites.
Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving With Grace, by Gordon MacKenzie is a fine place to start reading about innovation. It’s a thin volume that doubles as a work of art, with vivid writing and lots of whacky drawings.
MacKenzie spent 30 years working at Hallmark cards, where he carried various titles, surely the most interesting of which was “creative paradox.” You get the impression that some people thought he was truly cracked, but others regarded him as a creative genius.
This book is fun, interesting, and infused with sparkling insights about fostering creativity, innovation, and good work while simultaneously avoiding the centrifugal force of the corporate hairball. Even if you don't read it, you should buy it. It is a visually stunning book that otherwise defies description.
Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea, by Gary Kinder is a ripping good tale: Actually a pairing of two stories. The first, narrates the 1857 sinking of the steamship Central America along with 50 tons of gold rush era gold off the coast of North Carolina. The second begins a century later where we meet a precocious youngster named Tommy Thompson who takes nothing for granted and questions everything about everything. He is the embodiment of the true disruptor, the true innovator. Why? Why not? Who says? So what?
Fast forward thirty years. Tommy, now a recently graduated, mostly penniless engineering student decides to take on a problem that nobody, including the US government with its unlimited treasury, had been able to solve: how to do delicate, real work at the bottom of the deep blue sea. Not just take pictures or bash around with big scoops. Do real work like salvage a wreck that nobody could find, and do it in a way that didn’t destroy the site and the gold in the process.
As you must guess, Tommy not only finds the wreck, but salvages the gold. Lots of gold. And he does the whole thing for $12 million. It reads like fiction but teaches important lessons for anyone interested in innovation. It's a pot boiler from the first page to the last. If you like a good tale, if you like people with a never say never attitude, read this book.
The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail by Clayton M. Christensen, PhD is in my judgment, one of the two academically oriented must reads on the topic of innovation.
Unlike a lot of books on a lot of topics, Christensen has meticulously researched his topic, which is innovation, and what it does to established and emerging players in any market or value system. His message is simple and scary. There are two types of innovation: sustaining and disruptive. Established companies tend to do the first if they do any at all. It’s the other kind that kills them. And because the DNA of established companies is oriented towards serving the needs of shareholders (predictable returns) and customers (incremental improvement to what they’re already buying), they shy away from pursuing innovations that might upset either applecart.
Christensen spends most of the book making a well argued, not too-academic sounding case for his thesis and why you should care. He is less exhaustive on the prescriptive part, though he has some solid suggestions about how to introduce disruptive innovation into your organization.
The Deviant’s Advantage, How Fringe Ideas Create Mass Markets by Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker is one of the current hot business reads. In many ways it takes up where Christensen leaves off with the full intent of scaring the reader into believing that innovation happens, it’s driven by deviance out somewhere on the fringe where normal stops, and it’s headed your way where it just might overwhelm you if you’re not prepared.
Taking Christensen a step further on the prescriptive side as well, Mathew and Wacker lay out their ideas for what you can do to discover deviance while it’s out there somewhere, and position yourself to ride the wave of innovation on the way to business advantage. It’s a provocative book with great anecdotes and zippy writing.
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, by Malcom Gladwell is a book that many people recommended to me over the past year or so that somehow never made it to my reading list. Big mistake on my part.
If you have any interest at all in how ideas, products, social phenomena, diseases, or anything else you can think of "tip" and go from small and localized to big and everywhere, run right out and get this book. It has nothing to do with how to come up with something innovative, and everything to do with describing how something small gets to be something big in a hurry.
Gladwell is a fine writer with an engaging style, and his insights into the role of the few, stickiness of the idea, and the power of context will spin your imagination. It's one of my business book must reads. It should be one of yours as well.
Diffusion of Innovations was first published in 1962 by Everett Rogers, PhD. It is the other academic must read on the topic, and is more or less the standard textbook and reference on diffusion studies.
Most people have never heard of Rogers, but have heard of Geoffrey Moore, the author of the extremely popular Crossing the Chasm and its various spin-offs. If you want to read the breezy popularized rendition of how the adoption curve works (innovators, early adopters, etc.), you should definitely read Moore. Most people in technology did when the book first came out, and Moore continues to refresh the content and extend his franchise. There are lots of examples of companies you will have heard of and he punctuates his writing with pithy quips and rousing injunctions.
If you want to go to the source, read Rogers (that’s what Moore did). Rogers virtually invented the field, has done or read all the scholarly research, and lays out in clear, albeit academic language, exactly how and why innovations move from deviant and whacky ideas to the mainstream. It is both prescriptive and descriptive: he tells you why it works and how to make it work.
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Last modified:
05/03/06