Innovation Book Club

In this episode, Alex and Wais discuss an academic paper, ‘Ideas are born in fields of play: towards a theory of play and creativity in organisational settings’ by Charalampos Mainemelis and Sarah Ronson.

The premise of this article is that play is used in organisations in two ways, either to divert us from the tedium of work or to engage us at work and promote our creativity. Play, therefore, is key to innovation, but the authors argue that we don’t know how to harness play effectively or consistently to promote innovation.

In this episode, Alex and Wais discuss Scott E Page’s book The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off in the Knowledge Economy.

Scott Page argues that diversity in teams is not only the right thing to do from a social justice point of view, but it’s also the right thing to do if you want to create a successful business. This is because diversity is additive, it brings wider perspectives to complex problems, which means that you’re more likely to deliver better solutions.

In this episode, Alex and Wais discuss Nilofer Merchant’s concept of ‘Onlyness’.

Nilofer Merchant argues that at the heart of all ideas are human beings, but we have created a world in which powerful and entrenched hierarchies overlook those ideas that do not align with their own values and experience. Ideas, Merchant argues, are a product of our ‘onlyness’, they are the result of our own history and experience, visions and hopes, and this is what makes them unique. To give our ideas power we need to socialise them by building networks of like-minded people.

In this episode, Alex and Wais discuss Woody Wade’s book Scenario Planning: A Field Guide to the Future. 

Once the preserve of large-scale businesses with their own future-thinking departments, Woody Wade’s approach makes scenario planning both accessible and efficient for everyone. This approach allows organisations to better anticipate a future that is different from the present and align their innovation efforts to this future.

This retrospective article looks back at twenty years of disruption and argues that we’ve actually become confused about what disruptive innovation is, how it works, and the contribution it makes to innovation success. As a result, we get disruption all wrong. The authors use the example of Uber to explain how it’s not on a disruptive trajectory and shouldn’t be referred to as a disruptor.

In this episode, Alex and Wais discuss ‘Know your customer’s “Jobs to be Done”’, a 2016 HBR article by Clayton M Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David S Duncan.

The authors propose that innovation success has less to do with the quality of a particular product and more to do with whether that product ‘does a job’ for the user. The key to innovation, therefore, is to focus on the job, which sounds simple enough but requires the innovator to uncover complex social, emotional and psychological drivers, and then design products that deliver against these.

In this first episode of the second season of the Innovation Book Club, Alex and Wais discuss ‘Incremental and Radical Innovation: Design Research vs. Technology and Meaning Change’, an article by two giants of the design industry, Roberto Verganti and Donald Norman.

The authors were both interested in exploring why successive incremental innovations implemented over time never lead to radical breakthroughs. In fact, the opposite is often true. The key to unlocking this conundrum lies in the importance of meaning-based innovation that changes our understanding of what a product means for customers which then opens up new conceptual opportunities for product development because we are freed from our current paradigm of thinking.

In this episode, Alex Drago and Wais Pirzad discuss Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch’s seminal paper Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing which was originally published in the Journal of Marketing in 2004.

Abstract:

Marketing inherited a model of exchange from economics, which had a dominant logic based on the exchange of “goods,” which usually are manufactured output. The dominant logic focused on tangible resources, embedded value, and transactions. Over the past several decades, new perspectives have emerged that have a revised logic focused on intangible resources, the co-creation of value, and relationships. The authors believe that the new perspectives are converging to form a new dominant logic for marketing, one in which service provision rather than goods is fundamental to economic exchange. The authors explore this evolving logic and the corresponding shift in perspective for marketing scholars, marketing practitioners, and marketing educators.

In this episode of the Innovation Book Club, Alex Drago and Wais Pirzad discuss a Vice documentary based on Jeremy Rifkin’s book The Third Industrial Revolution.

The book blurb:

“The Industrial Revolution, powered by oil and other fossil fuels, is spiralling into a dangerous endgame. The price of gas and food are climbing, unemployment remains high, the housing market has tanked, consumer and government debt is soaring, and the recovery is slowing. Facing the prospect of a second collapse of the global economy, humanity is desperate for a sustainable economic game plan to take us into the future.

Here, Jeremy Rifkin explores how Internet technology and renewable energy are merging to create a powerful "Third Industrial Revolution." He asks us to imagine hundreds of millions of people producing their own green energy in their homes, offices, and factories, and sharing it with each other in an "energy internet," just like we now create and share information online.

Rifkin describes how the five-pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution will create thousands of businesses, millions of jobs, and usher in a fundamental reordering of human relationships, from hierarchical to lateral power, that will impact the way we conduct commerce, govern society, educate our children, and engage in civic life.

Rifkin's vision is already gaining traction in the international community. The European Union Parliament has issued a formal declaration calling for its implementation, and other nations in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, are quickly preparing their own initiatives for transitioning into the new economic paradigm.

The Third Industrial Revolution is an insider's account of the next great economic era, including a look into the personalities and players — heads of state, global CEOs, social entrepreneurs, and NGOs — who are pioneering its implementation around the world.”

In this episode of the Innovation Book Club, Alex Drago and Wais Pirzad discuss Joseph Schumpeter’s ideas on Creative Destruction.

From Investopedia:

“The term creative destruction was first coined by Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1942. Schumpeter characterized creative destruction as innovations in the manufacturing process that increase productivity, describing it as the "process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one."

Basically, the theory of creative destruction assumes that long-standing arrangements and assumptions must be destroyed to free up resources and energy to be deployed for innovation. To Schumpeter, economic development is the natural result of forces internal to the market and is created by the opportunity to seek profit.

Creative destruction theory treats economics as an organic and dynamic process. This stands in stark contrast with the static mathematical models of traditional Cambridge-tradition economics. Equilibrium is no longer the end goal of market processes. Instead, many fluctuating dynamics are constantly reshaped or replaced by innovation and competition.

As is implied by the word destruction, the process inevitably results in losers and winners. Producers and workers committed to the older technology will be left stranded. Entrepreneurs and workers in new technologies, meanwhile, will inevitably create disequilibrium and highlight new profit opportunities.

In describing creative destruction, Schumpeter was not necessarily endorsing it. In fact, his work is considered to be heavily influenced by The Communist Manifesto, the pamphlet by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels which decried the bourgeoisie for its "constant revolutionizing of production [and] uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions."

In this episode of the Innovation Book Club, Alex Drago and Wais Pirzad discuss Warren Berger’s noted book A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas.

The book’s blurb:

“In this groundbreaking book, journalist and innovation expert Warren Berger shows that one of the most powerful forces for igniting change in business and in our daily lives is a simple, under-appreciated tool--one that has been available to us since childhood. Questioning--deeply, imaginatively, "beautifully"--can help us identify and solve problems, come up with game-changing ideas, and pursue fresh opportunities. So why are we often reluctant to ask "Why?"

Berger's surprising findings reveal that even though children start out asking hundreds of questions a day, questioning "falls off a cliff" as kids enter school. In an education and business culture devised to reward rote answers over challenging inquiry, questioning isn't encouraged--and, in fact, is sometimes barely tolerated.

And yet, as Berger shows, the most creative, successful people tend to be expert questioners. They've mastered the art of inquiry, raising questions no one else is asking--and finding powerful answers. The author takes us inside red-hot businesses like Google, Netflix, IDEO, and Airbnb to show how questioning is baked into their organizational DNA. He also shares inspiring stories of artists, teachers, entrepreneurs, basement tinkerers, and social activists who changed their lives and the world around them--by starting with a "beautiful question."

In the second episode of the Innovation Book Club, Alex Drago and Wais Pirzad discuss Peter Drucker’s seminal article, The Theory of the Business, originally published in Harvard Business Review in 1994.

The blurb:

“Peter F. Drucker argues that what underlies the current malaise of so many large and successful organizations worldwide is that their theory of the business no longer works. The story is a familiar one: a company that was a superstar only yesterday finds itself stagnating and frustrated, in trouble and, often, in a seemingly unmanageable crisis. The root cause of nearly every one of these crises is not that things are being done poorly. It is not even that the wrong things are being done. Indeed, in most cases, the right things are being done―but fruitlessly. What accounts for this apparent paradox? The assumptions on which the organization has been built and is being run no longer fit reality. These are the assumptions that shape any organization's behaviour, dictate its decisions about what to do and what not to do, and define what an organization considers meaningful results. These assumptions are what Drucker calls a company's theory of the business.”

In this first and pilot episode of the Innovation Book Club, Alex Drago and Wais Pirzad discuss Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From: the Natural History of Innovation.

Here’s the blurb:

“Where do good ideas come from? And what do we need to know and do to have more of them? In Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson, one of our most innovative popular thinkers, explores the secrets of inspiration.

Steven Johnson has spent twenty years immersed in creative industries, was active at the dawn of the internet and has a unique perspective that draws on his fluency in fields ranging from neurobiology to new media. Why have cities historically been such hubs of innovation? What do the printing press and Apple have in common? And what does this have to do with the creation and evolution of life itself? Johnson presents the answers to these questions and more in his infectious, culturally omnivoracious style, using examples from thinkers in a range of disciplines - from Charles Darwin to Tim Berners-Lee - to provide the complete, exciting, and encouraging story of inspiration.

He identifies the six key principles to the genesis of great ideas, from the cultivation of hunches to the importance of connectivity and how best to make use of new technologies. Most exhilarating is his conclusion: with today's tools and environment, radical innovation is extraordinarily accessible to those who know how to cultivate it. By recognizing where and how patterns of creativity occur - whether within a school, a software platform or a social movement - he shows how we can make more of our ideas good ones.”