5 books on Innovation I recommend to everyone
During the pandemic, having a little bit more time for myself, I had the idea to invest more time in something I like a lot: reading physical books. Oh yes, going back to paper! I asked around, I’ve got some recommendations and started my reading journey. I’ve got a lot of inspiration from it and thought I could share the 5 innovation books I liked the most these last months. So here we go!
The Inevitable
Kevin Kelly describes 12 technological trends that will shape our future. Since I work with Knowledge Management, the ones that inspired me the most were “cognifying our surroundings”, “sharing as a cultural trend”, “filtering” (what they call the “exhilarating avalanche of new stuff — that — is created every day”) and “accessing over owning”. But all of them are quite interesting and relevant, so check them all.
The Innovator’s method
In this book, Nathan Furr and Jeff Dyer bring all the good pieces of advice from the classic “The Lean Startup” while translating them to the reality of intrapreneurs and people who work specifically with innovation (such as multidisciplinary teams and open innovation teams). You will discover their approach to identify problems & solutions and also their insights about business models and scaling. This book is a must-have for anyone working with innovation.
Ten types of Innovation
A very complete book by Larry Keeley, Ryan Pikkel, Brian Quinn and Helen Walters. Through a lot of examples and some proposed analysis models and frameworks, they explain 10 types of innovation based on: profit model, network, structure, process, product performance, product system, service, channel, brand and customer engagement. I was quite impressed by how they organized the content. You will finish the book with a very clear idea of where to look for innovation and how to start your own strategies.
Create the future
Another book that is very well designed and structured. Written by Jeremy Gustche, the book touches upon a very important topic about innovation: culture. From the ability to change to opportunity hunting and adaptive innovation, the chapters dive into what is needed to build a culture of innovation. And a plus: many chapters end with workshop questions and tactics for each of the topics.
Innovation Communities
By Benoit Sarazin, Patrick Cohendet, Laurent Simon, this one brings many examples of communities of practice that were created with the goal of pushing innovation. I must confess I was quite proud to see Ubisoft as one of the examples. Each chapter brings an example from a different community, which opens our eyes to different types of structure, goals and ways of creating those communities. If you want to know more specifically about communities of practice I recently shared my insights from the book Business of belonging.
