This book describes a revolutionary methodology for enhancing technological innovation called TRIZ. The TRIZ methodolgy is increasingly being adopted by leading corporations around the world to enhance their competitive position. The authors explain how the TRIZ methodology harnesses creative principles extracted from thousands of successful patented inventions to help you find better, more innovative, solutions to your own design problems. Whether you're trying to make a better beer can, find a new way to package microchips or reduce the number of parts in a lawnmower engine, this book can help.
Business consultants everywhere preach the benefits of innovation—and promise to help businesses reap them. A trendy industry, this type of consulting generates courses, workshops, books, and conferences that all claim to hold the secrets of success. But what promises does the notion of innovation entail? What is it about the ideology and practice of business innovation that has made these firms so successful at selling their services to everyone from small start-ups to Fortune 500 companies? And most important, what does business innovation actually mean for work and our economy today? In Creativity on Demand, cultural anthropologist Eitan Wilf seeks to answer these questions by returning to the fundamental and pervasive expectation of continual innovation. Wilf focuses a keen eye on how our obsession with ceaseless innovation stems from the long-standing value of acceleration in capitalist society. Based on ethnographic work with innovation consultants in the United States, he reveals, among other surprises, how routine the culture of innovation actually is. Procedures and strategies are repeated in a formulaic way, and imagination is harnessed as a new professional ethos, not always to generate genuinely new thinking, but to produce predictable signs of continual change. A masterful look at the contradictions of our capitalist age, Creativity on Demand is a model for the anthropological study of our cultures of work.
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The structure and regulation of consumption and demand has recently become of great interest to sociologists and economists alike, and at the same time there is growing interest in trying to understand the patterns and drivers of technological innovation. This book brings together a range of sociologists and economists to study the role of demand and consumption in the innovative process. The book starts with a broad conceptual overview of ways that the sociological and economics literatures address issues of innovation, demand and consumption. It goes on to offer different approaches to the economics of demand and innovation through an evolutionary framework, before reviewing how consumption fits into evolutionary models of economic development. Food consumption is then looked at as an example of innovation by demand, including an examination of the dynamic nature of socially-constituted consumption routines. The book includes a number of illuminating case studies, including an analysis of how black Americans use consumption to express collective identity, and a number of demand–innovation relationships within matrices or chains of producers and users or other actors, including service industries such as security, and the environmental performance of companies. The involvement of consumers in innovation is looked at, including an analysis of how consumer needs may be incorporated in the design of high-tech products. The final chapter argues for the need to build an economic sociology of demand that goes from micro-individual through to macro-structural features.
This book examines dynamics between demand and innovation and provides insights into the rationale and scope for public policies to foster demand for innovation.
By 2020, 40 percent of the workforce won’t want to be your employee. That means managers and executives have to forget the old recruit-and-search for-months methods to acquire talent and revise their perception that “talent” is only full-time employees. The good news is that this talent allows you to achieve the biggest impact on your projects in the fastest time possible. In Navigating the Talent Shift, author Lisa Hufford introduces you to SPEED: a fast, and flexible talent strategy that shows companies how to access the 65 million people that make up the on-demand, specialized talent pool. This strategy shows you how to: • Stop spending months searching for talent• Have a team of on-demand talent at your fingertips• Exponentially expand your talent pool • Test ideas and change direction fast to stay competitive and drive innovation• Reduce severance and layoffs• Bring a fresh perspective with strategic doers on your team• Do more with less Navigating the Talent Shift will show you and your team how to tap into an on-demand workforce while providing you with the talent you need to be nimble and successful.
Innovation is the life blood of practically every organization. Innovation drives growth, development, and prosperity for many organizations and geographical areas. Sometimes, innovation thrives within a certain geographical location or in certain organizations that are known for their innovative approaches. This outstanding new volume will demonstrate how to measure the success of innovation in all types of organizations. In the last decade, there have been tremendous investments in creativity and innovations sponsored by companies, cities, states, countries, universities, NGO’s, and even non-profits. With the magnitude of emphasis on creativity and innovation, the sponsors and key stakeholders will demand to know the value of these programs. The Value of Innovation: Measuring the Impact and ROI in Creativity and Innovation Programs will show step-by-step how to measure the impact and the ROI of innovation and creativity programs. The process collects six types of data: reaction, learning, application, impact, ROI, and intangibles. Data are collected analyzed and reported using a systematic, logic model. Conservative standards create results that are both CEO and CFO friendly. This proven process has been used now in 5000 organizations and this new book adapts the method directly to this critical area of innovation, showing examples and case studies.
A critical exploration of today's global imperative to innovate, by champions, critics, and reformers of innovation. Corporate executives, politicians, and school board leaders agree—Americans must innovate. Innovation experts fuel this demand with books and services that instruct aspiring innovators in best practices, personal habits, and workplace cultures for fostering innovation. But critics have begun to question the unceasing promotion of innovation, pointing out its gadget-centric shallowness, the lack of diversity among innovators, and the unequal distribution of innovation's burdens and rewards. Meanwhile, reformers work to make the training of innovators more inclusive and the outcomes of innovation more responsible. This book offers an overdue critical exploration of today's global imperative to innovate by bringing together innovation's champions, critics, and reformers in conversation. The book presents an overview of innovator training, exploring the history, motivations, and philosophies of programs in private industry, universities, and government; offers a primer on critical innovation studies, with essays that historicize, contextualize, and problematize the drive to create innovators; and considers initiatives that seek to reform and reshape what it means to be an innovator. Contributors Errol Arkilic, Catherine Ashcraft, Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, W. Bernard Carlson, Lisa D. Cook, Humera Fasihuddin, Maryann Feldman, Erik Fisher, Benoît Godin, Jenn Gustetic, David Guston, Eric S. Hintz, Marie Stettler Kleine, Dutch MacDonald, Mickey McManus, Sebastian Pfotenhauer, Natalie Rusk, Andrew L. Russell, Lucinda M. Sanders, Brenda Trinidad, Lee Vinsel, Matthew Wisnioski
Slicing through blunt theories of supply and demand, Callon presents a rigorously researched but counterintuitive model of how everyday market activity gets produced. If you’re convinced you know what a market is, think again. In his long-awaited study, French sociologist and engineer Michel Callon takes us to the heart of markets, to the unsung processes that allow innovations to become robust products and services. Markets in the Making begins with the observation that stable commercial transactions are more enigmatic, more elusive, and more involved than previously described by economic theory. Slicing through blunt theories of supply and demand, Callon presents a rigorously researched but counterintuitive model of market activity that emphasizes what people designing products or launching startups soon discover—the inherent difficulties of connecting individuals to things. Callon’s model is founded upon the notion of “singularization,” the premise that goods and services must adapt and be adapted to the local milieu of every individual whose life they enter. Person by person, thing by thing, Callon demonstrates that for ordinary economic transactions to emerge en masse, singular connections must be made. Pushing us to see markets as more than abstract interfaces where pools of anonymous buyers and sellers meet, Callon draws our attention to the exhaustively creative practices that market professionals continuously devise to entangle people and things. Markets in the Making exemplifies how prototypes, fragile curiosities that have only just been imagined, are gradually honed into predictable objects and practices. Once these are active enough to create a desired effect, yet passive enough to be transferred from one place to another without disruption, they will have successfully achieved the status of “goods” or “services.” The output of this more ample process of innovation, as redefined by Callon, is what we recognize as “the market”—commercial activity, at scale. The capstone of an influential research career at the forefront of science and technology studies, Markets in the Making coherently integrates the empirical perspective of product engineering with the values of the social sciences. After masterfully redescribing how markets are made, Callon culminates with a strong empirical argument for why markets can and should be harnessed to enact social change. His is a theory of markets that serves social critique.
Tamara Ghandour, author, podcaster, keynote speaker and founder of innovation training company, LaunchStreet, used to believe that innovation was the domain of a select few, exclusive to certain industries, or relegated to a specific job role. But, as Tamara discovered in her 25 years of work and research, everybody has the capacity to innovate. It's a person's unique innovation style, (which can be assessed and channelled), that can transform inertia into innovation. Drawing on eye-opening data from her proprietary Innovation Quotient Edge Assessment, Innovation is Everybody's Business is for those looking for solutions to the daily pain of "how do I prove my worth," a reality for many people whether they work in the C-Suite or on the front-lines. This book will resonate with those that recognize that being more innovative is their ticket to beingindispensable.It is also for leaders under pressure to build a culture of innovation but don't know how. As organizations face pressure to innovate, the accountability for making it happen falls on senior and mid-level leaders. They are told what to do, but not how to do it. This book will give them a tool to build a team of innovators who make an impact every day in big and small ways.
Managers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists all seek to maximize the financial returns from innovation, and profits are driven largely by the quality of the opportunities they pursue. Based on a structured and process-driven approach this book demonstrates how to systematically identify exceptional opportunities for innovation. An innovation tournament, just like its counterpart in sports, starts with a large number of candidates, with opportunities as the players. These opportunities are pitted against each other until only the exceptional survive. This book provides a principled approach for the effective management of innovation tournaments - identifying a wealth of promising opportunities and then evaluating and filtering them intelligently for greatest profitability. With a set of practical tools for creating and identifying new opportunities, it guides the reader in evaluating and screening opportunities. The book demonstrates how to construct an innovation portfolio and how to align the innovation process with an organization's competitive strategy. Innovation Tournaments employs quirky, fresh examples ranging from movies to medical devices. The authors' tool kit is built on their extensive research, their entrepreneurial backgrounds, and their teaching and consulting work with many highly innovative organizations.
