Authors : Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, Clayton M. Christensen
Why the ideas in this book should matter to you
Over the last decade, many books on the topic of innovation and creativity have been written. Some books such as Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators (Govindarajan and Trimble), Game Changer (A.G.Lafley and Ram Charan) and the Entrepreneurial Mindset (Rita McGrath and Ian MacMillan) examine how organisations and organisational leaders, encourage and support innovation.
Others look more specifically at product development and innovation processes within and across firms, such as How Breakthroughs Happen (Andrew Hargadon) and The Sources of Innovation (Eric von Hippel)
Other books on innovation look at the roles individuals play in the innovation process within companies, such as The Art of Innovation (Tom Kelly of IDEO) or A Whole New Mind (Daniel Pink)
Finally, some books like Creativity in Context (Teresa Amabile) and Creativity (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) examine individual creativity and, more specifically, theories and research about creativity.
Our book differs from the others in that it is focused squarely on individual creativity in the business context and is based on our study of a large sample of business innovators, including some big-name innovators such as Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com), Pierre Omidyar (eBay), Michael Lazaridis (Research in Motion/BlackBerry), Michael Dell (Dell), Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com), Niklas Zennstrom (Skype), Scott Cook (Intuit), Peter Thiel (PayPal) and so on.
The premise of our book is that we explain how these big names got their "big ideas" and describe a process that readers can emulate. We describe in detail five skills that anyone can master to improve his or her own ability to be an innovative thinker.
Our study includes four types of innovators :
Start-up entrepreneurs
Corporate entrepreneurs (those who launch an innovative venture from within a corporation)
Product innovators (those who invent a new product)
Process innovators (thouse who launch a breakthrough process)
While these different types of innovators have numerous similarities, they also have some differences, which you can read in the book.