The Other Side of Innovation Solving The Execution Challenge by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble.

The Other Side of Innovation Solving The Execution Challenge by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble.

The Other Side of Innovation is about innovation inside enterprises. It does not cover innovation inside startups. This is a business management book. The authors argue that there are usually two ways to innovate; build special innovation teams or improve on existing products.

Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble argue that for major changes it is important to create special groups of people outside of every day operations. This is because innovating requires different skills and mindset than day to day operations. They make the case that innovation is about learning, experimenting, and taking risks. These are not day to day activities in most corporations.

I found their argument convincing. Where they said innovation occurs inside a corporation is in its "performance engine". It is there that small continuous changes in process and execution can be introduced over time. This has to have more than just ideas and excution, it also has to be accepted by managers or it will not work.

The examples the authors use are from large corportations; Nucor, Fisher-Price, John Deere, Thomson West and other large corporations. The writing is easy to follow; it is in plain english. The book is written for the practitioner. It even includes a set of assessment tools at the end of the book.

There is a Scholarly Foundation section at the end of the book. Like all the content in this book, they justify their choices. They not only give bibliographic citations, they also give reasons why the material was cited. This makes the writing more believable.

This book is a quality business title. It is published by Harvard Business Review Press. Both Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble are faculty at The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. There is a companion website at http://www.theothersideofinnovation.com I plan to read their other book, Ten Rules For Strategic Innovators. It is supposed to be more focused on startups.

Where Good Ideas Come From The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson

Where Good Ideas Come From The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson

This book is a history of how good ideas and inventions come into being.  It is very scientific and technically oriented focusing on Charles Darwin, James D. Watson, Willis Haviland Carrier, Enrico Fermi, and other people with breakthrough ideas.  At the same time, it uses historical examples to extrapolate ways that individuals will likely become more innovative.

Some of the ideas behind the book are not intuitive.  For example, Tim Berner's Lee development of the world wide web occurred over a long time period without any single eureka moment.  Many ideas come from slow continuous development.

Steven Johnson describes many ways to increase individual innovation; keep a diary, browse libraries, bookstores, and the internet, have workspaces which mix order and disorder, keep a wide variety of hobbies, and go to places where ideas flow freely like cafes and innovative spaces. 

The author uses lots of stories and examples to illustrate his points.  He even has a timeline of innovation in the appendix of this book.  The Notes and Further Reading section cites numerous authors like Clay Shirky, Charles Darwin, Jaron Lanier, Malcolm Gladwell, Edward O. Wilson, and Lawrence Lessig.  This book will have an especially strong appeal to people interested in computers and new media.

The book is not just about individual ways that people can innovate.  It also describes some causes of innovation like serendipity, exaptation, and error. In addition it goes beyond the individual to include examples of environmental factors.  For example, cities condense the amount of people freeing people to try new things, and platforms like Twitter increase the ability to communicate new ideas.

I found the book to be very well organized.  This made it easy to think about what I was reading.  In addition to the appendix which had the Chronology of Key Innovations 1400 to 2000 and the Notes and Further Reading, there was a bibliography and index.  This is a very well put together book.  Amanda Dewey is listed as the designer for the book.  If you look on the internet, she has designed quite a few bestsellers.

Daily Thoughts 8/4/2009

Photograph of Robert Louis Stevenson, 1880

Daily Thoughts 8/4/2009

I am almost done reading In Search of Excellence. I think I will finish reading it by the end of today. I am looking at another book, Planet Google, One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know by Randall Stross.

Today was another quiet day. I did more weeding in the 700s. We also had a planning meeting for programming for September through December. There should be some interesting programmig coming up; computer classes, a graphic novel book club, library tours, a display for banned books, some poetry classes, and other events. It was a group effort of which I was a small part.

I looked at the suggestion sheet from patrons and added a few books to my order.

On the train home, I finished reading In Search of Excellence. I rather liked the concept that creativity is innovation which has not been implemented. I started reading How You Make The Sale by Frank McNair. The book is on consultative selling or selling by focusing on solving the customers needs or problems. It is a very customer centric approach. I am learning about the idea of "close to the customer".

Daily Thoughts 5/17/2009

Stage adaptation of It Can't Happen Here a novel by Sinclair Lewis. WPA-- Works Project Administration

Daily Thoughts 5/17/2009

I've started reading Pop Goes the Library Using Pop Culture to Connect With Your Whole Community by Sophie Brookover and Elizabeth Burns. The book starts with the distinction between popular culture and high culture. I like to think of high culture as a source of philanthropy and prestige, and popular culture as a source of circulation and government money. Public libraries need both of them to survive in equal measure. Sometimes they meet in unusual ways. Oprah's Book Club is an example of how high culture and popular culture can intersect. Some of the selections; East of Eden by John Steinbeck, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Love In the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez represent high culture.

I spent some more time reading Pop Goes The Library by Sophie Brookover and Elizabeth Burns at the laundromat. I usually sit and drink coffee while the laundry spins. I got up to the section on technology. My favorite part of the book are the quotes from practicing librarians at the ends of the chapters.

China Mieville has a new book coming out The City and The City. He is a very popular author for fantasy novels. I liked Un Lun Dun his young adult novels. I didn't like some of his other novels despite their popularity. I found some of the philosophy annoying. Allan Steele also has a new novel in his Coyote series, Coyote Horizon. I have enjoyed the series about colonization of an alien world.

I put the book, The Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker on hold. I am interested in the idea when I was reading The Kaizen Way, that there is a logical way to integrate discontinuous innovation with continuous improvement.