Harvard Business Review on Innovation ("Harvard Business Review" Paperback) [Paperback]

This is one in a series of several dozen volumes which comprise the "Harvard Business Review Paperback Series." Each offers direct, convenient, and inexpensive access to the best thinking on the given subject in articles originally published by the Harvard Business School Review. I strongly recommend all of the volumes in the series. The individual titles are listed at this Web site: www.hbsp.harvard.edu. The authors of various articles are among the world's most highly regarding experts on the given subject. Each volume has been carefully edited. Supplementary commentaries are also provided in most of the volumes, as is an "About the Contributors" section which usually includes suggestions of other sources which some readers may wish to explore.

In this volume, we are provided with eight articles, in each of which the focus is on a specific aspect of innovation. For example, the first was co-authored by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. They explain how to create new market space. The core concepts were later developed in much greater depth (no pun intended) in their book, Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant. They are also the co-authors of a second article in this HBR anthology, "Knowing a Winning Business Idea When You See One." They offer three "tools": the buyer utility map (how attractive a new business idea will likely be), the price corridor of the mass (identifying a price which will unlock the greatest number of buyers), and the business tool model guide (a framework for determining whether and how a company can profitably deliver the new idea at the targeted price). Authors and co-authors of the other six articles explain how creative breakthroughs were achieved at 3M, how to build an innovation "factory," how to meet the challenge of disruptive change, how to discover points of differentiation, how to use the social sector as a beta site for business innovation, and finally, how and why "enlightened experimentation" offers the new imperative for innovation.

As a long-time subscriber to the Harvard Business Review, I am always curious to see which of the articles it publishes lead to books such as Kim and Mauborgne's Blue Ocean Strategy. With Michael Overdorf, Clayton M. Christensen wrote "Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change." Its core concept is explored in The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution, and most recently in Seeing What's Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change, a current bestseller which Christensen co-authored with Erik A. Roth and Scott D. Anthony.

I highly recommend all of the various volumes which comprise the "Harvard Business Review Paperback Series." Every executive should own and frequently consult those which are most relevant, indeed essential to her or his own professional development. Years ago, then president of Harvard Derek Bok observed, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." The wisdom of that observation is especially true of attractively priced paperbacks such as this one.

My only regret is that Teresa M. Amabile's "How to Kill Creativity" was not included. However, fortunately, it is the lead article in a companion volume, Harvard Business Review on Breakthrough Thinking. For those who wish to explore her work in much greater depth, I strongly recommend Creativity in Context: Update to the Social Psychology of Creativity.

While by no means a great book, this collection of articles on innovation from the Harvard Business Review is a good introduction to the art of innovation, as it is written in a simple but effective style. The articles also address the topic of innovation in a variety of ways, thus ensuring that almost everyone will find something useful that is written in a style conducive to their preferences.

This is a good introduction to innovation, but for more, readers should check out Clayton Christensen's three books: The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution, and Seeing What's Next. Those books map out the formula to innovation in great depth and clarity, and make it a point to help entrepreneurs and executives see how the concepts presented can by applied to their businesses.

First, I apologize for the mixed metaphor in the title above.

Second, all the articles in this collection are "good".

Third, however, you may, as I, be more than a little tired of academics from the world's greatest universities, for decades, on topics like innovation, publishing little bits and pieces.

Fourth, I recently bought 200 books with innovation or its synonyms in their titles or blurb descriptions, grouped them in groups, and ordered books from best to junk within each group. Then I surveyed the whole thing asking myself "what, overall, are all the theories of innovation that are out there and which of them have been tested?"

It turns out there are 27 theories of innovation out there and none of them have been tested, as a whole theory, but bits, extremely small bits, of some of them have been nibbled at by the world's greatest academics from the world's greatest universities. I counted full coverage of NONE of these 27 approaches to innovation, in this particular book. NONE. What is in this book is nibbles of two of the 27--wowie!!! Harvard has nibbled 2 of 27 theories around on innovation--what a powerful research effort! I am sooooo impressed. My friend in Reuters just emailed me complaining how naive I am--professors do not do comprehensive things because they hate the good ideas of their competitors! I am naive. I thought professionals learned to respect and admire the good ideas of their peers and competitors--I am too naive!

Conclusion: if you want some more little bits about innovation, here is another, one of a series of 200 books presenting disconnected little bits about innovation. If you want, however, more what the world's best scholars should be capable of--that is, a comprehensive, thorough survey of all the theories and approaches to innovation in our world, ordered, analyzed, compared, and made sense of, so you have both a mental feel and a practical repertoire of the diversity in doing innovation there to be tried, then this book will sorely disappoint you, not only in its contents but also in the quality of mind that today gets tenure at the "world's best universities".

If these are the world's best minds on innovation--then we live in a more pitiable world than I ever imagined before. Pity us, poor pitiful us!

Honestly, I cannot fault these guys for their bits--each little tiny bit article is cute, nice in its own way, and impressive sounding. However, when I add them all up, I get a sense that this book covers approximately 1/200th of innovation overall. Why string us readers out and make us buy 200 books like this before we get a thorough, grounded, comprehensive, useful overview of all the theories of and approaches to innovating around? I am tired of bits and pieces. I am a little angry at the "world's best professors" from the "world's best universities" stringing me and millions of others along with bits and pieces. Without a forest and a deep thorough understanding of a forest, interest in any one tree is not only unwise, but in real markets run by real people, quite dangerous. The bit of innovation you got from this sort of book and masterfully applied gets run over by 19 other bits, not in this book, that you never heard of till they mashed your project/company. This is not myth--it happened to three global corporations I managed. Bits are dangerous--however clever they make their authors, for a tiny moment, look. I am no longer able to develop any enthusiasm for them.

I could review each bit in this book but to tell you the truth, it does not matter what the bits in this book are--they are all so very very tiny and bit-sized, isolated and cute, that you know, as you read each article, there are 1000s of similar bits in similar books out there. You can sell an awful lot of books this way without conveying a useable understanding of a field like "innovation". Derek Bok, in his earlier incarnation as head of Harvard used to declaim in books on higher education how professors are so very very very narrow and how what they publish is so very very very sliverish in journals that are so very very very unread. I love every five years or so when the Academy of Management journals and reviews get a new editor, to read his/her article declaiming, with the subtlest whimper in his/her tone, how "nobody reads all this great research we publish". They do not read it because it is "bits and pieces".

This book is "great" by the criteria of modern "torture assistant professors for 7 years" American-esque academics--but by the criteria of people like me trying to get 10,000 people to stop being bureaucratic and do what they must do to survive Chinese and other competition, these bits are increasingly useless, cute, and decorative. I do not look forward to the next bits from any of these authors. I fear their entire lives will be consumed in bit-ness. If I read books like this, my own life will be thusly consumed. These professor guys need to do some work, stop publishing the smallest fastest possible bit, and COVER a topic not nibble it. We need people with heftier minds in these pompous over priced elitist universities our media worship.

If you want to know the kind of book I like on innovation--try Van de Ven's Minnesota Studies on Innovation (not the exact title--a big black covered book of about 800 pages). That whole body of longitudinal work following a dozen innovations through 20 years of ups and downs dwarfs what you learn from these cute little assistant-professor style bits and pieces books. It is statistically much better and more powerfully grounded, the research questions are framed profoundly not opportunistically for tenure, and the richness of real lived history of each followed innovation undoes nearly all that cute little assistant-professor books by authors like these, says.