Driving Growth Through Innovation [Hardcover]

The goal of this book is an ambitious one: To summarize and condense all the key issues of innovation while showing you practically how to implement a systematic innovation process. Tucker does a fine job of meeting this goal, drawing on his study of the Innovation Vanguard companies. He covers a wide terrain, including the cultural factors necessary for innovation, numerous methods for "empowering the idea management process", ensuring that your idea factory keeps running, looking ahead to innovate based on what the future probably holds, and how to develop saleable and innovative products. I'm happy to see that Tucker, unlike too many writers on the subject, recognizes that product innovation is just a start. Process innovation and innovation in business model design are crucial. The issues underlying business model innovation are handled well given the constraints of one chapter.

You'll find plenty of checklists and summaries, including five principles for driving growth through innovation, 11 ways to improve your firm's culture for greater innovation effectiveness, eight idea management models, 10 guidelines for your own idea management system, and more. At the end of the book, Tucker provides a map for going about starting your own innovation initiative. This is practically an encyclopedia of corporate innovation ideas. It would be instructive to follow up this book by comparing the new book on Open Innovation by Chesbrough as well as digging deeper into business model innovation.

Tucker begins the book by building the business case for systematic innovation: Why is it a survival issue for organizations today? Why do so many corporate leaders agree that innovation is a key strategic issue, yet have great difficulty in actually implementing systematic, pervasive innovation within their companies? What's needed is a systematic and comprehensive strategy for innovation, and that is the focus of this book. Systematic innovation, according to Tucker, is comprehensive, involves all employees, is focused on an organized, systematic and ongoing search for future business opportunities, and is focused on delivering new value to customers.

In Tucker's quest to deconstruct the DNA of systematic innovation, he covers an impressive collection of key strategic innovation issues, including how different corporate leadership styles and cultures can influence an organization's commitment to innovation, or lack thereof; how to identify unmet customer needs and build market-leading new products around them; and techniques for "future scanning" -- "mining" emerging trends in an organized, systematic way to uncover exciting new business opportunities.

Driving Growth Through Innovation is highly practical and inspiring book, a field guide to successfully implementing systematic innovation that should be on every entrepreneur and innovation manager's bookshelf, yet at the same time a compelling manifesto for change in how most companies approach innovation. Tucker does a terrific job of clearly and compellingly explaining the systematic innovation methodologies used by the Innovation Vanguard companies, and provides readers with one valuable insight after another into how to make these principles work for you.

I highly recommend this book!