Larry Keeley, Ryan Pikkl, Brian Quinn, Helen Walters
5.0 out of 5 stars Deep, Broad, Structured, Fundamental Reference for Adult Students and Professionals, May 21, 2013
Another reviewer has laid out the book's structure. This review builds on that one.
I've been a fan of several innovation books, such as The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail and The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth, while also respecting earlier pioneers such as Peter Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. When I got this book my first impression was “too much design” (at first glance it looks like an advanced comic book) but after several passes I now consider this volume perfect — the authors have put an EXTRAORDINARY amount of thinking into going beyond the ten types of innovation (each discussed in its own chapter) to the nuts and bolts of spotting trends, making innovation happen, and keeping innovation alive (often the hardest).
Certainly this book is superb for students in any sector — government, private, non-profit, I'd even suggest the declining labor unions and churches study this book. It has universal value and applicability. It is also a book that is easily sufficient to warrant being in a CEO's handful of books worth returning to over and over again. At one level this is a textbook, at another level this book, as it is designed, is perfect for recurring reflection.
The underpinnings of the book are impressive — over 3,000 cases. The index is usefully divided into Companies, People, and Topics.
Missing from this book — perhaps even justifying a sequel — is more emphasis on whole systems modeling, true cost economics, and completely new models of production such as the emerging trends of open money and new forms of accounting, sharing, and the new terms degrowth, anti-consumerism, and peak consumption. Although the book addresses the use of information to spot innovation opportunities, it does not address the fact that perhaps 80% of everything we are told by banks, corporations, and governments is a lie — within academia that is probably closer to 40% but the other 60% is old knowledge. Somewhere, firmly rooted in this book but exploding beyond it, lies the concept of META-INNOVATION. Pioneers like Stewart Brand have tried to address this. Put simply, this book here is best in class for innovation from the inside out. Still missing, although I tried in my own way to address it (see my signature line), is a book on innovation from the outside in — innovation that stems from a massive cultural shift that imposes buy-cotts against Monsanto, Walmart, Google, Microsoft, and other “innovators” that continue to betray the public interest and demands completely new forms of doing EVERYTHING, starting with Open Source Everything (OSE).
See Also:
Philosophy and the Social Problem: The Annotated Edition
Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure
Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto (Hardcover)
Designing a World that Works For All: Solutions & Strategies for Meeting the World's Needs
Need, Speed, and Greed: How the New Rules of Innovation Can Transform Businesses, Propel Nations to Greatness, and Tame the World's Most Wicked Problems
The Leadership of Civilization Building: Administrative and civilization theory, Symbolic Dialogue, and Citizen Skills for the 21st Century
How People Harness Their Collective Wisdom And Power to Construct the Future (Research in Public Management (Unnumbered).)
Best wishes to all,
Robert David STEELE Vivas
INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability
