Innovating with Impact
The Economist Edge Series
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
We're all innovators now. Thinkers and entrepreneurs Ted Ladd and Alessandro Lanteri show us how to make the most of our ideas.
It is a myth to consider innovation the domain of the special few who are inspired by "eureka!" moments that always result in brilliant new products. In reality, anyone with the right tools, traits, and methods has the potential to innovate with impact, generating profits and even changing the world.
In this engaging guide, top thinkers and entrepreneurs Ted Ladd and Alessandro Lanteri show how to create innovations that deliver customer value. Their Innovation Pyramid outlines a strategic process that is rooted in the right cultures and mindsets and uses a range of methods, techniques and themes to reach the pinnacle of maximum impact.
Throughout the book, stories and examples from different organisations and contexts bring the text to life. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to create, innovate, improve performance, and ultimately, make a difference.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ladd, an entrepreneurship professor at Hult International Business School, and Lanteri (Clever), a strategy professor at ESCP Business School, deliver solid advice on entrepreneurship. For inspiration on how to improve one's business, the authors recommend the four tiers of their "Innovation Pyramid": mindset, methods, themes, and impact. The "innovator's mindset," Ladd and Lanteri contend, embraces taking risks, acting competitively, and being confident, independent, and open to feedback. A five-step process for coming up with original ideas suggests that readers determine the concerns of prospective customers, define what they will seek to gain from one's product or service, brainstorm ideas on how to provide that, develop prototypes, and then test the product on customers. The authors highlight "themes" that many contemporary innovations share, and explain that, for example, Nespresso's decision to sell low-cost coffee machines that use single-use coffee pods with high profit margins is representative of the "innovative pricing" trend. The recommendations are useful and smart, even if Ladd and Lanteri's fondness for diagrams, frameworks, and self-tests has the dubious benefit of making the straightforward advice appear abstruse (a graph of the "three horizons framework" overcomplicates the insight that businesses must expand as they age). Still, this eye-opening manual has its fair share of worthy ideas.
