A step-by-step guide to successfully transforming any organization It is well recognized that succeeding at innovation is fundamental in today's hyper-competitive global marketplace. It is the only way to outperform current and emerging competitors sustainably. But what we call “innovation” is messy and difficult and too often lacks the rigor and discipline of other management processes. The Innovator's Field Guide: Market Tested Methods and Frameworks to Help You Meet Your Innovation Challenges changes that. It is a practical guide that moves beyond the “why” to the “how” of making innovation happen, for leaders and practitioners inside organizations of all sizes. Written by two pioneers in the field of embedding innovation in organization, The Innovator's Field Guide focuses on the most pressing innovation problems and specific challenges innovation leaders will face and offers concrete solutions, tools, and methods to overcome them. Each chapter describes a specific innovation challenge and details proven ways to address that challenge Includes practical ideas, techniques, and leading practices Describes common obstacles and offers practical solutions Any leader or professional who needs concrete solutions—right now—to the critical challenges of innovation will find invaluable aid in the practical, easy-to-understand, and market-tested approaches of The Innovator's Field Guide.

What do Ford Motor Company, Steelcase, Scania, Goodyear, Novo Nordisk, and Philips Electronics have in common? They all need to get their best ideas to market as fast as possible. They need to achieve the mastery of innovation. When these companies needed to accelerate time-to-market, get more new products to customers, and improve their ROI from investments in R&D, they turned to Lean Product Development to help them master the process of innovation. By adapting Lean ideas to their specific product development challenges, they learned how to focus innovation on the problems that would maximize customer and business value, and deliver on their best ideas. Winner of a Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award! The Mastery of Innovation: A Field Guide to Lean Product Development describes the experiences of 19 companies that have achieved significant results from Lean Product Development. Their stories show that Lean Product Development delivers results: Ford Motor Company completely reinvented its Global Product Development System and put decades of knowledge about automotive design at its engineers’ fingertips DJO Global, a medical device company, more than tripled the number of products they released to the market and cut development time by 60% Playworld Systems cut time-to-market in half–twice The diverse set of North American and European case studies in this book range from very small product development organizations (three engineers) to very large (more than 10,000). Some of the industries represented include automotive, medical devices, industrial products, consumer electronics, pharmaceuticals, scientific instruments, and aerospace. These companies have generously shared their knowledge about Lean Product Development to help you get your best ideas to market faster.

A step-by-step guide to successfully transforming any organization It is well recognized that succeeding at innovation is fundamental in today's hyper-competitive global marketplace. It is the only way to outperform current and emerging competitors sustainably. But what we call “innovation” is messy and difficult and too often lacks the rigor and discipline of other management processes. The Innovator's Field Guide: Market Tested Methods and Frameworks to Help You Meet Your Innovation Challenges changes that. It is a practical guide that moves beyond the “why” to the “how” of making innovation happen, for leaders and practitioners inside organizations of all sizes. Written by two pioneers in the field of embedding innovation in organization, The Innovator's Field Guide focuses on the most pressing innovation problems and specific challenges innovation leaders will face and offers concrete solutions, tools, and methods to overcome them. Each chapter describes a specific innovation challenge and details proven ways to address that challenge Includes practical ideas, techniques, and leading practices Describes common obstacles and offers practical solutions Any leader or professional who needs concrete solutions—right now—to the critical challenges of innovation will find invaluable aid in the practical, easy-to-understand, and market-tested approaches of The Innovator's Field Guide.

The action-based guide to powerful, influential organizational storytelling Circle of the 9 Muses captures the best practices of the world's most influential story consultants and knowledge workers to help you find, tell, and draw value from your organizational stories as impetus for action. This rich toolbox is loaded with fun, graphical instructions and dozens of unique, replicable, and facilitated processes that require no special training or expertise. You'll discover your organization's hidden narrative assets, use different templates and frameworks to tell the stories of your past, present, and future and then draw team members into rich meaning-making dialogue that translates into action. These activities can be exercised in endless permutations, and expert advice steers you toward the right activity for a specific purpose, including managing change, setting strategy, onboarding, defining the brand, engaging supporters or customers, merging cultures, building trust, and much more. Organizational storytelling is a powerful managerial tool and an essential change management technique. This is about your influence as a leader. Knowing the right story to tell and how to deliver it effectively gives you and your organization enormous influence, and helps connect employees to strategy by providing understanding, belief, and motivation in their personal contribution. This book is the ultimate field guide to becoming an influential storyteller, with concrete, actionable guidance toward all the storytelling fundamentals. Identify your organization's "narrative assets" Craft an elegant, well-constructed organizational story Capture, bank, and share stories with extraordinary engagement Facilitate a dialogue to draw out meaning and induce change The growing interest surrounding organizational storytelling has many change agents focused on "trying to tell better stories," but goals are useless without a plan of action. Circle of the 9 Muses helps you weave narrative wisdom into organizational development activities, engaging employees and driving change.

A learn-by-doing guide to developing, testing, and pitching a startup idea, balancing a pragmatic approach and rigorous academic content. This innovative book offers a learn-by-doing guide to entrepreneurship that balances practical advice with rigorous academic content. It introduces important concepts, provides highly engaging examples, and supplies the tools needed to put lessons into practice, creating a research-supported, step-by-step reference for developing, testing, and pitching any startup idea. By integrating lean startup principles, design thinking, and elements of the jobs-to-be-done framework, this combination textbook-workbook allows readers to choose for themselves whether, or to what extent, to engage with theory. All of the book's ten chapters encourage hands-on effort, providing readers with easy-to-follow steps, calls to action, and attainable milestones. Aspiring entrepreneurs will find this systematic approach to be more efficient than haphazard trial and error, and much more likely to yield concrete results. Chapters begin with a "mini case," offering real-world examples of each step in the process. These cases--all featuring entrepreneurs working outside the Silicon Valley bubble--include a meadery operator that turned customers into advocates by designing compelling experiences and the development of a dating app for dog lovers that found a unique niche in a crowded market. Throughout, readers are immersed in the activity of starting a business, guided not only through the successful development of a startup but also to an understanding of the principles underlying entrepreneurship. The book can be used as a text in undergraduate and graduate classes and as a reference by entrepreneurs and innovators.

A groundbreaking new leadership paradigm built with the raw materials of the life sciences and chaos theory. This simple but powerful system reinforces the best of traditional leadership approaches while providing compelling new insights and strategies-a dynamic hands-on tool for fostering a culture of innovation and pragmatic creativity within any organization. The target audience is business executives, as well as leaders of government and non-profit organizations and anyone who seeks to promote positive change.

Product Innovation Toolbox: A Field Guide to Consumer Understanding and Research brings together key thought-leaders and seasoned consumer researchers from corporate R&D, academia and marketing research companies to share their experiences, cutting edge consumer research tools and practical tips for successful and sustainable product innovation. This is an essential resource for product developers, marketers and technologists who want to implement consumer-centric innovation and are responsible for designing product-testing strategies from upfront innovation to support new product development. The scope of the book by chapter shows the steps that transform a consumer researcher to a Consumer Explorer that guides the project team to successful innovation and new product introductions. Product Innovation Toolbox is designed to appeal to broad audiences from consumer researchers, product developers, marketers and executives. With an emphasis on consumer understanding and examples that range from cheese to lipstick and printers to energy beverages, Product Innovation Toolbox offers guidelines and best practices for strategizing, planning and executing studies with confidence and high efficiency yielding faster and better insights.

A toolkit for those adapting or creating mindfulness training courses or products

Open innovation and crowd sourcing are the hottest topics in strategy and management today. The concept of capturing ideas in a hub of collaboration, together with the outsourcing of tasks to a large group of people or community is a revolution that is rapidly changing our culture. A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing explains how to use the power of the internet to build and innovate in order to introduce a consumer democracy that has never existed before. If a business fails to embrace it, it is at risk of being left behind. Written by an international team of eminent thinkers, writers and practitioners in the field, A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing covers the definition of open innovation, how to manage virtual teams and co-create with customers, how to overcome legal and IP issues and common mistakes and pitfalls to avoid. With corporate case studies and best practice advice, A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowd Sourcing is a vital read for anyone who wants to find innovative products and services from outside their organizations, make them work and overcome the practical difficulties that lie in the way.