Boost Innovation on Your Team

HBR's 10 Must Reads on Innovation

If you read nothing else on inspiring and executing innovation, read these 10 articles. We’ve combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you innovate effectively. Leading experts such as Clayton Christensen, Peter Drucker, and Rosabeth Moss Kanter provide the insights and advice you need to:

Decide which ideas are worth pursuing
Innovate through the front lines―not just from the top
Adapt innovations from the developing world to wealthier markets
Tweak new ventures along the way using discovery-driven planning
Tailor your efforts to meet customers’ most pressing needs
Avoid classic pitfalls such as stifling innovation with rigid processes

Extreme Teams: Why Pixar, Netflix, Airbnb, and Other Cutting-Edge Companies Succeed Where Most Fail

Managers want great teams, but most build them around decades-old ideas and practices made popular by companies that have lost their edge. Extreme Teams looks at the new generation of teams driving growth in today's most innovative firms. They do this by tossing conventional wisdom and doing things differently. The book takes you inside these bold companies and examines the teamwork experiments powering their results, including how:

Pixar's teams use rapid-cycle feedback and no-holds debate to transform initially flawed films into billion-dollar hits
A culture of radical "freedom and responsibility" helps Netflix execute on the next big thing and transform its industry
Whole Food's super-autonomous teams embrace tough metrics and friendly competition to drive performance
Zappos embraces the weirdness and fun that sustains its success

Times change, and so must teams. Designing and managing high-performance teams requires upgrading outdated beliefs and behaviors, and creating in your company the level of intensity and collaboration needed to face down any challenge.

Innovative Teams (HBR 20-Minute Manager Series)

Don't leave creativity up to the "creatives" in your organization. Fostering creativity within your team can help your organization solve problems, create innovative products, break out into a new market, and even communicate and collaborate more effectively. Innovative Teams shows you how to:

Create the right environment for inventive thinking
Build a diverse team
Generate a wide array of new ideas
Manage disagreements
Make sure your ideas actually get implemented

Don't have much time? Get up to speed fast on the most essential business skills with HBR's 20-Minute Manager series. Whether you need a crash course or a brief refresher, each book in the series is a concise, practical primer that will help you brush up on a key management topic. Advice you can quickly read and apply, for ambitious professionals and aspiring executives--from the most trusted source in business. Also available as an ebook.

The Innovative Leader: How to Inspire Your Team and Drive Creativity

The Innovative Leader is written to address, in a practical way, the questions of innovation that managers face: How can managers transform employees from cubicle dwellers into innovation warriors? Where can the ideas come from to fuel the supply of innovation? How does one find the time and resources to try new ideas? Sloane stresses the competitive advantage of innovation and creativity in modern business. He shows how to apply methods of innovation and creativity to the individual, to business peers, and to the organization. Paul Sloane demonstrates the importance of setting out one's vision clearly, and he emphasizes the need for continual evaluation of the process. Through numerous international examples he illustrates how organizations such as Virgin, Body Shop, Disney, and 3M have benefited from this approach, encouraging excellence and entrepreneurship through challenging goals that keep employees motivated and engaged.

Mapping Innovation: A Playbook for Navigating a Disruptive Age

We're entering a new era of innovation. Learn the strategies of the world's most inventive startups, corporations and scientific institutions. Today, managers are often told that they must "innovate or die," but are given little useful guidance on how to go about it. Sure, there are many books and articles that champion one approach or another, but till now there has been no effective guide to help executives find their way through the tangled jungle of competing ideas. In this book you will find:

Insights into how the world's top innovators implement their innovation strategies.
A step-by-step guide to creating your own innovation playbook to win markets and run circles around your competition!
A simple-to-use framework for identifying the optimal innovation strategy that is most likely lead to a successful outcome.

The truth is that there is no one "true path" to innovation, no silver bullets and no shortcuts. There are, however, effective strategies that managers can pursue to dramatically increase their chances of success. Thoroughly researched, backed by original reporting and told through compelling stories of innovative organizations such as Google, IBM, Experian, Argonne National Laboratory and MD Anderson Cancer Center, Mapping Innovation will give managers what they have been looking for, a strategic playbook for navigating a disruptive age.

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