Driving Growth Through Innovation
How Leading Firms Are Transforming Their Futures
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
You’ve read creativity books before, but innovation, as bestselling author Robert B. Tucker explains in this groundbreaking book, is much, much more: it is bringing new ideas to life—to drive growth, profitiablity and competitive advantage. Innovation is fast becoming the critical business skill of the 21st century.
Driving Growth Through Innovation will take you behind the scenes to learn the winning methods behind some of the most exciting breakthroughs of our time. You will find out how innovators at Colgate-Palmolive brainstormed a product—Colgate Total—that unseated Crest to become the world’s leading toothpaste brand. Learn how Citigroup, the world’s largest financial services company, has used its global innovation initiative to generate fifteen to twenty percent of their revenue from products that have been introduced in the previous two years. Witness a highly unconventional, even controversial, focus group that Daimler Chrysler used to design the breakthrough PT Cruiser. Get the true story of how developers at Maytag used their experiences with designing the revolutionary Neptune washer to jumpstart growth in a mature market. And how Dana Corporation consistently elicits two ideas per month per employee with a stunning eighty percent implementation rate.
This second edition has been revised and updated throughout and includes a self-assessment instrument so that readers can evaluate the innovation culture and practices of their organizations, as well as a discussion of the newly emerging position of chief innovation officer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's hard to argue with this book's basic premise: innovation is good; stagnation is bad. Tucker has built a consulting firm around the idea that innovating can be taught. "In most companies today," he claims, "the practice of innovation can be likened to the mating of pandas: infrequent, clumsy, and often ineffective." Tucker's book is at its best when it moves from sweeping generalities to nitty-gritty how-tos, spelling out specific management tactics for fostering creativity and innovation. He wisely suggests there is a little entrepreneur within us all, and employees are naturally motivated to improve products and processes. A manager's job is to figure out how to channel those new ideas and take away the fear that can stunt them. There are useful strategies for making the field of innovation systematic and for shepherding new ideas through development to implementation. The book has some stylistic and organizational problems, though. Tucker's prose is clunky, and chapters sometimes resemble thin expansions of a Power Point presentation. In addition, Tucker bolsters his points with real-life examples, but nearly every company he names (such as 3M, DuPont and Sony) is large and relatively mature. Managers of small or young enterprises might question the relevance of those examples.
