The Business of Innovation: Managing the Corporate Imagination for Maximum Results

By Roger Bean and Russell Radford

This is a guide to building innovative, creativity-rich organizations through astute and skillful management. Whatever the end goal, this book provides a systematic process for managing focused, usable innovation - without the micro-managing that can stifle creativity. With examples from McDonald's, Toyota, Palm (Pilot), 3M, Sony, Singapore Airlines and others, this model helps managers and executives: nurture an environment of innovation; support market-focused innovation through effective policies; gather expert feedback to properly evaluate innovations; develop and launch innovations successfully; and project future trends and developments.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814406319
• ISBN13: 9780814406311
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: Amacom Books
• Length: 302 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.8" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

A Good Read!

Roger Bean and Russell Radford examine the history of innovation for ways that your organization can innovate continually. They ask why companies successfully innovate for a while and then lose steam. Their answer is a new organization-wide system that prioritizes innovation, management and strategy. This fairly academic structure - more like a proposal than a working process - encourages building systemic promotion of continual innovation by creating an environment that values, nurtures and encourages it, cascading from the executive to the managerial to the operational team level. However, toward the end of the book, the authors refer to using a Balanced Scorecard for assessing performance from a total quality perspective. That approach bypasses the inspirational, charismatic form of innovation and cuts right to the process, like an accountant or an engineer's model of innovation. Thus, if you are process-savvy but hesitant about new ideas, we suggest that this might just be the innovation book for you: lots of system, not much flash.

A Good Read!

Roger Bean and Russell Radford examine the history of innovation for ways that your organization can innovate continually. They ask why companies successfully innovate for a while and then lose steam. Their answer is a new organization-wide system that prioritizes innovation, management and strategy. This fairly academic structure - more like a proposal than a working process - encourages building systemic promotion of continual innovation by creating an environment that values, nurtures and encourages it, cascading from the executive to the managerial to the operational team level. However, toward the end of the book, the authors refer to using a Balanced Scorecard for assessing performance from a total quality perspective. That approach bypasses the inspirational, charismatic form of innovation and cuts right to the process, like an accountant or an engineer's model of innovation. Thus, if you are process-savvy but hesitant about new ideas, we from getAbstract suggest that this might just be the innovation book for you: lots of system, not much flash.