Top 10 reads on innovation
A good friend of mine asked for my top 10 reads on innovation. Here’s my list covering a range of essential topics.
Successful innovators don’t care about innovating by Doug Sundheim. If you are doing innovation to be innovative you are in it for the process of innovation and not its outcome. Sundheim asks us to focus on the goal: delivering new value to the customer delivering new value to the business.
https://hbr.org/2014/10/successful-innovators-dont-care-about-innovating
The Customer Jobs-to-be-done theory has greatly improved the narrative in regard to why we are doing innovation (customer value = business value). And made the approach far more accessible to companies and people. The theory is based on decades of work by Strategyn (Outcome Driven Innovation) and then popularized by Clayton Christensen (and lately many more). This was one of Christensen’s first articles on the subject.
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/finding-the-right-job-for-your-product/
Before Jobs-to-be-done came Ted Levitt and his article Marketing Myopia. Levitt argues that organizations getting too focused on their product miss opportunities as they are not seeing how customer needs change or evolve. This is a marketing classic.
https://hbr.org/2004/07/marketing-myopia
And ofcourse, not to be forgotten. Osterwalder and Pigneur’s Business Model Canvas continued the accessibility of business innovation by developing and masterfully promoting their method and framework across the world.
But innovation is not only a product of itself. It’s the result of several pieces coming together to make the perfect puzzle. Following is a list of articles foundational (in my view) to creating a system of innovation inside an organization.
Strategy
Can you say what your strategy is? by David J. Collis and Michael G. Rukstad offers clarity to what you are trying to achieve and why you should be doing it. In a world of messy narratives around missions, visions, values and principles this article stays focused on a few key topics essential to have clarity on what the organization is trying to achieve and why it’s valuable.
https://hbr.org/2008/04/can-you-say-what-your-strategy-is
Experimentation
Stefan Thomke wrote a series of excellent articles (and a highly recommended book) introducing the concept of business experimentation. Instead of making innovation into an event or a ceremony extrinsic to the organization. Trust that people have brilliant ideas all the time. Innovation as experimentation can become a part of the organizations operating model .. if we design for it.
https://hbr.org/2020/03/building-a-culture-of-experimentation
The University of Bocconi did a randomized control trial with more than 100 startups finding that the organizations trained on experimentation / the scientific method vastly outperformed the organizations only trained on the classic innovation methodologies. They offer a course, online-course and several articles plus reports exploring the subject.
Insights
Our imagination is limited to the insights and information available to us. If we can get better and broader insights our imagination, creativity and ideas will blossom. With the article An anthropologist walks into a bar … by Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel B. Rasmussen I was introduced to the concept and importance of thick data and insights. It gave me a toolbox to go after the customer insights with new means in new ways.
https://hbr.org/2014/03/an-anthropologist-walks-into-a-bar
System thinking
Innovation is about seeing and making new connections in order to deliver new value to the customer and the business. With systems thinking we are able to create a more accurate map of the relationships and influences leading to our desired outcomes. For organizations previously limited to one-dimensional models like journeys or SWOTs its a completely new approach to externalizing and connecting the expertise and insights available in the organization to more clearly see the system we are a part of and where our influence can have an effect. Donella Meadows wrote a series of articles and books on the subject. This article is a great place to start just to understand how different systems thinking is and how it can help.
https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/
Leadership
Essential to any innovative organization is it’s leadership, diversity and inclusion. Leadership is creating a shared milieu where people come together to agree on what the situation is, how to collaborate and depend on each other to solve it. Mary Parker Follett wrote The Giving of Orders in 1926 and it’s still an innovative and forward thinking piece on leadership, accountability and effectiveness.
180360720.no/_resources/mary_parker_follett_the_giving_of_orders.pdf
