Check out the All Things Innovation bookstore here.
Highlights From the Innovation Bookshelf
The bookstore is not meant to be a definitive list of all innovation related works in the industry and beyond. But it’s rather a highlighted and curated selection from several innovation pros in the community; books that are their favorites, which inspired, taught, and provided fresh knowledge to those in the community—suitable for novices learning a new methodology to those experienced executives with many years established in the field.
Some of the more notable classics include The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail by Clayton M. Christensen. Christensen shows how even the most outstanding companies can do everything right yet still lose market leadership.
Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation, by Linda A. Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove, and Kent Lineback. Why can some organizations innovate time and again, while most cannot? You might think the key to innovation is attracting exceptional creative talent. Or making the right investments. Or breaking down organizational silos. All of these things may help—but there’s only one way to ensure sustained innovation: you need to lead it—and with a special kind of leadership. Collective Genius shows you how.
Fire in the Machine: Driving Entrepreneurial Innovation in Large CPG Organizations by Jonathan Tofel and Carolina Sasson, share insight gained from decades spent working within and consulting for Fortune 500 companies. They share the strategies that have helped their CPG clients harness entrepreneurialism and balance the startup mindset with big business systems to unleash the best of both worlds.
Corporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Startups at the Innovation Game, by Andrew Binns, Charles A. O’Reilly III, and Michael Tushman is another notable book for its take on corporate innovation. Innovation used to be seen as a game best left to entrepreneurs, but now a new breed of corporate managers is flipping this logic on its head. These Corporate Explorers have the insight, resilience, and discipline to overcome the obstacles and build new ventures from inside even the largest organizations.
The book Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, by Amy Edmondson, is a revolutionary guide that will transform your relationship with failure, from the pioneering researcher of psychological safety and award-winning Harvard Business School professor Edmondson. We used to think of failure as the opposite of success. Now, we’re often torn between two “failure cultures”: one that says to avoid failure at all costs, the other that says fail fast, fail often. The trouble is that both approaches lack the crucial distinctions to help us separate good failure from bad. As a result, we miss the opportunity to fail well.
Whether it’s an academic guide to open innovation or a handbook that explores design thinking methodologies, there’s something related to innovation for just about everyone at the All Things Innovation bookstore.
Check out the All Things Innovation bookstore here.
Video: “Five must-read books on innovation,” courtesy of Crash Course MBA.
