The Oxford Handbook of Innovation (Oxford Handbooks in Business and Management) [Paperback]

Great book about innovation. It is not very especifc about some subjects, but gives a good view about innovation and its processes.

The first reviewer hit the nail right on the head with his short succinct comments---not much detail. He is pulling his punches too much to help readers so I am here, unpulling those same punches he had.

First embrace the positive---
a. all reviewers are famous (but most of the best famous ones in the field are missing from the volume--the reason given below)
b. all the reviews are comprehensive (but ALL interesting details are missing entirely, totally unmentioned in this book)
c. no thinkable kind of sentient being could possibly stay awake through reading any sequence of 3 or more paragraphs from this book
(this book is a fabulous sleep aid for those sleep deprived)
d. the reviews are from an academic standpoint---if you are a professor orienting your grad students this book has a viewpoint for them---it aims them squarely at vague general abstract questions that will allow reams of unread publishing and produce no disagreements for the very simple reason that they will go entirely unread
e. Descartes really wrote this book (if you are bloodless, a vampire etc. this book is you---totally without a world of implementation--save the occasional bite perhaps)

Now the negative----
a. every single book in this series is awful---not worth a tenth the price (I bought 3 out of Title Excitement, a bad habit of mine)
b. every academic editing and writing for this series is bloodless---disembodied seriously enough that they have become sleep aids
c. great topics comprehensively skimmed shallowly by bloodless vampires does NOT make for good thought--it is, instead, how Britain died intellectually a few decades before she died economically and politically---end of empire, end of umpire, end of Churchhill and all those morning highballs and scotches that got him through generals and the war with his dictions in tact.

If you are a technical person---remember Lisp in AI and Prolog in AI???? The same thing---one was a way to DO something new in the world and the other was a way to hope that centuries old mental logic habits would be enough of how humans thought that new thinking and understanding of the mind could be avoided another century or two. These books---all of them in the series---are Prolog-like in that specific sense. They are a collective giant edited REFUSAL of thought.

If you like the refusal of thought chopped up into impressive-titled chapters---these books and their editors are for you. If you are seeking the world's largest collection of vapid sentences on interesting topics, these books are for you. (And those companies zooming past you and yours in markets are people reading something else).

This whole Oxford series is perhaps a sneaky remnant KGB team trying still to subvert British and anglo-in-general thought, perhaps by putting entire populations to sleep.

HERE IS A LITTLE TEST---
I bought 200+ books on innovation a few years ago and for some industry and U of Chicago courses, interviewed 150 famous innovators and summarized the 200+ books in chart formats. The result was an overall model of 45 models of innovation (that I now teach in industry and at universities like Keio in Japan). SOOOOOO I got out the beer last night and my chart of 45 innovation approaches (each one with dozens of citations in the research literature) and went carefully through this Oxford Handbook. WELL WELL WELL... what a surprise...........out of 45 approaches, a solid 8 EIGHT found mentioned any way in this "comprehensive" "handbook".
YOU CAN DO THIS TEST TOO---
Look for mention of Stuart Kaufmann, Melanie Mitchel, Cowan, the Santa Fe Institute, recent developments in understanding natural selection "innovation" in nature and in org analogs---this is ONE of the 37 MISSING innovation approaches I am talking about. This book is bloodless!!

This is the kind of REFUSAL to think (and work and read and do due intellectual dilligence) that I am talking about in this review. I am an old man and close enough to dying that I might not make it through this review I am writing. I do not have time to waste on phony books by phony publishers and the phony editors and the phony authors/academics/contributors they assemble. This kind of publishing makes me ANGRY---it turns off tens of thousands of students to valid topics due to the poor quality of their leaders and seniors. It is a lazy indulgent older generation so pompous they no longer care for integrity, passion, depth, deep thought, hard reasoning among alternatives. It is a perfect representative of how rich old cultures and nations die. It is death incarnate. AND they sell this????!!!!! Integrity starts with the mind and then with what we publish (and who we recruit as "contributors"). For goodness sake this company Oxford publishing needs to wake up and stop vampiring in print!!!

WHAT PUZZLES ME---is this---Britain is a hotbed of design, design management, creative industry developments, brilliant thinking, innovative product developments, cross-EU collabs, and a lot of intellectual ferment MISSING ENTIRELY ENTIRELY ENTIRELY ENTIRELY from every word and volume of this Oxford series. It is as if the editors at Oxford and the people hiring them do not live in or see Britain? How can this be? Are they wearing some sort of all-too-dark glasses?