Making Innovation Work
In their book, Making Innovation Work: How to Manage It, Measure It, and Profit from It, authors Tony Davila, Marc Epstein, and Robert Shelton show what works, what doesn't, and how to use management tools to dramatically increase the payoff from innovation investments. They have drawn from their own extensive innovation consulting experience, as well as a thorough review of innovation research. In this book, they show readers how to define the right strategy for effective innovation; how to structure an organization to innovate effectively; how to implement management systems to assess ongoing innovation; how to incentivize teams to deliver, and much more. Making Innovation Work offers the first authoritative guide to using metrics at every step of the innovation process — from idea creation and selection through prototyping and commercialization.
As they write in Chapter 1, "Driving Success: How You Innovate Determines What You Innovate":
As innovation leaders like Apple, Toyota, Dell, Nucor Steel, Sony, and others have shown, making important changes to key parts of the dominant business model or the essential technology can redirect the competitive vectors of an entire industry. For any organization, innovation represents not only the opportunity to grow and survive but also the opportunity to significantly influence the direction of the industry. Apple Computers took the industry by surprise when it launched iTunes and iPod, not so much because these were innovations that nobody had ever thought of before in the PC arena. Instead, it was the strategy of combining technology change and business model change into a one-two innovation punch. And the iTunes/iPod combination is only starting to generate new concepts; one of the latest is an iPod special edition with U2 (the famous rock band), which opens up rich partnership opportunities with content providers. Apple has put its mark again on the direction of the PC industry — a mark that will be tough to erase.
As innovation leaders like Apple, Toyota, Dell, Nucor Steel, Sony, and others have shown, making important changes to key parts of the dominant business model or the essential technology can redirect the competitive vectors of an entire industry. Innovation provides the opportunity for a company to put its mark on the evolution of business. By setting the rules of the game in their industries, these companies have taken a leadership position and play the game that favors them the most.
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