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The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures
 
 
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The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures (Hardcover)

by Frans Johansson (Author) "IN THE SPRING OF 2002, a team of researchers at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, conducted a remarkable experiment ..." (more)
4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 207 pages
  • Publisher: Harvard Business School Press (1 Sep 2004)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1591391865
  • ISBN-13: 978-1591391869
  • Product Dimensions: 24.1 x 16.3 x 2.5 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 170,387 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #79 in  Books > Business, Finance & Law > Management > Management Skills > Creativity

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Product Description

The Financial Times, September 23, 2004
...there is a good deal that managers can draw from this collection of
ideas. - From the Hardcover edition
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description
Innovation is an evergreen topic because it is such an essential ingredient for successful growth—and this book provides a new and fascinating perspective on how new innovations can best be found and developed

Managers from all kinds of companies will find this book of interest. This book is so well written and is filled with such engaging examples that we expect it to break out beyond a business audience to general readers.

It is similar to The Tipping Point in terms of tone, readability, and rich, interesting stories, which show how innovative ideas were born in intersections that combined arenas as diverse as card games and sky rises, Palm Pilots and carrots, airplanes and cookies, ants and truck drivers.

Offers practical strategies anyone can use to develop novel new ideas big and small, in all areas of life and work.

Note: The book’s title refers to an explosion of creativity that occurred in Florence during the Renaissance, when the Medici banking family funded creators from many different disciplines to come together to debate, discuss, and discover new ideas. The book is about how any of us can create our own “Medici effects” using the concept of “the intersection”

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Inside This Book (Learn More)
First Sentence
IN THE SPRING OF 2002, a team of researchers at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, conducted a remarkable experiment. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A Special Place Where "Extraordinary Ideas" Are Born, 2 Jun 2006
By Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

As Johansson carefully explains, this book is really not about the Medici family, although the community of creative people its members funded exemplifies all manner of exciting possibilities for collaborative productivity; nor is it really a "business book," although Johansson asserts -- and I wholly agree -- that there are lessons to be learned from that community which can be of substantial value to organizations in the 21st century. For example, to corporations which rely on multi-lingual communications and multi-disciplinary initiatives to compete successfully in a global marketplace.

So, what is this book's core concept? The idea behind it is simple: "When you step into an intersection of fields, disciplines, or cultures, you can combine existing concepts into a large number of extraordinary ideas."

Johansson achieves three specific objectives: He explains what, exactly, "the Intersection is and why we can expect to see a lot more of it in the future"; next, he explains "why stepping into the Intersection creates the Medici Effect"; finally, he outlines "the unique challenges we face when executing intersectional ideas and how we can overcome those challenges." With regard to the third objective, I am again reminded of a passage in Leading Change where Jim O'Toole observes that there are always unique and formidable challenges when threatening what he characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom."

In Part One, Johansson focuses on the Intersection which, for most of us, offers the best environment in which to innovate. Next, he explains how to create the Medici Effect within that creative and collaborative environment. Then in Part Three, he offers specific suggestions as to HOW to make intersectional ideas happen. I share Johansson's faith in what an Intersection makes possible, no matter who is involved, no matter where that Intersection may be located. I also agree with him that we can all create the Medici Effect because we can all get to the Intersection. "The advantage goes to those with an open mind and the willingness to reach beyond their field of expertise. It goes to people who can break down barriers and stay motivated through failures." There are countless examples of groups whose talented members created the Medici Effect. For example, the research laboratory which Thomas Edison established for himself and his associates in Menlo Park (NJ) in 1876; he relocated it to West Orange (NJ) in 1883.

Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman examine more recent examples in their book, Creating Genius: the Disney studios which produced so many animation classics; Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) which developed the first personal computer; Apple Computer which then took it to market; in the so-called "War Room" which helped to elect Bill Clinton President in 1992; the so-called "Skunk Works" where so many of Lockheed's greatest designs were formulated; Black Mountain College which "wasn't simply a place where creative collaboration took place" for the artists in residence from 1933 to 1956, "it was about creative collaboration"; and Los Alamos (NM) and the University of Chicago where the Manhattan Project eventually produced a new weapon called "the Gadget."

Although the brief excerpt which follows is taken from Johansson's Introduction, it serves as an appropriate conclusion to my brief commentary: "We, too, can create the Medici Effect. We can ignite the explosion of extraordinary ideas and take advantage of its individuals, as teams, and as organizations. We can do it by bringing together different disciplines and cultures and searching for places where they connect. [begin italics] The Medici Effect [end italics] will show you how to find such intersectional ideas and make them happen. This book is not about the Renaissance era, nor is it about the the Medici family. Rather, it is about those elements that made that era possible. It is about what happens when you step into an intersection of different disciplines and cultures, and bring the ideas you find there to life."

If there is another book published in recent years which is more intellectually stimulating than this one, I have not as yet read it.
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3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars One approach, but not necessarily the right one for all, 20 Mar 2005
Based on the premise that the most significant innovations occur at the intersection of ideas and concepts, this consultant authored book adopts the parallel of the creativity of the Medici banking family in Renaissance Italy to build another 'how to' approach for breakthrough innovation. Mixing Darwin, Clayton Christensen and even Mike Oldfield to illustrate the context, it uses PDAs, unmanned aerial vehicles, Virgin Atlantic and Vertex as examples of historical intersectional innovation, and then offers advice on how to improve innovation performance through following a codified process focused on exploring the key intersections that impact the markets and technology spaces in which firms operate. This is a good overview of one approach that may well work for some, but may equally not be right for all.
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5.0 out of 5 stars An innovative book with new perspectives , 21 Nov 2008
By EuropeanDiversity (Cologne, Germany) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Medici Effect: What You Can Learn from Elephants and Epidemics (Paperback)
The connection of innovation and diversity appears to be obvious to some extend: You need significantly different perspectives and skills in order to create something groundbreaking. If only experts from a field work together, invention (or enhancement) will be the result, but no sought-after leap forward. Consequently, Frans Johansson's book, The Medici Effect, has been hyped in corporate and Diversity contexts for a while. Especially when you have followed one of the author's inspirational talks, you can't wait to read the book and find out more about how innovation happens or can be generated. But then, in order to set your expectations right, consider the following: Johansson is portrayed as an entrepreneur and journalist, and the book is described to focus less on a corporate setting than on self-starting and individual achievements.
No doubt, the book itself is an innovation as it offers new perspectives to explore creativity, and it combines a number of established facts or more-or-less-known examples in an inspiring way. However, Johansson does all this in a journalistic manner: He profiles fascinating people, and points to connections few people might have thought about before. And he does it in an entrepreneurial way: The (profitable) extend to which he combines publishing (it's available in several languages), presenting (his talks are legendary) and consulting is rare outside strategy and marketing. Just like a good journalist, the author had spoken to many people, and collected a multitude of views and a wealth of personal stories. Those stories, combined with the creative way of linking and commenting them, are the big plus of the book. Johansson illustrates in a powerful way, that the key to innovation is combining concepts from previously unrelated areas (in what he calls intersections), create large numbers of possible solutions (and being ready to see some fail), and to take risks (even against established ideas in one's networks) actually executing new concepts. While the book offers great ideas about how to look at the creative process (other books do that in different ways), it offers very little help as to how the innovation process can actually be managed. Notions like "explosion of ideas" or the "Medici effect" itself sound way to romantic in order to actually work in organisational contexts, where power issues and politics and many other influences determine if, where and how change happens.
If you take Managing Diversity & Inclusion as an innovation that is happening at the intersection of corporate management, personal values, political systems and societal change, you can easily see many of the dynamics described in `The Medici Effect'. Implementing Diversity programmes requires to use a number of methodologies from change management (overcoming resistance) and from innovation management (using promoters of power and others). If you combine the inspirational strength of this book with some robust models and some solid tools, you can make a big difference!

(nl 18 ms)
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