Innovation by Design: What It Takes to Keep Your Company on the Cutting Edge

by Gerard H. Gaynor

Executives in all industries prize innovation as a key ingredient in market relevance, brand awareness, and bottom-line growth. Too often, though, innovation is relegated to traditional cradles of creativity like R & D and marketing. Now this important new book shows how innovation can be a boon not just to a company's product line, but to every facet of its business. "Doing innovation" company-wide requires not only an attitude of innovation from every individual, but a corporate commitment to a new organizational model, in which every department is expected to innovate. Empowering companies toward that end, the author * idea generation, creating new models, and breaking rules * the roles of individuals, groups, and corporate culture in innovation * assessing the organization's infrastructure and resources * overcoming resistance and identifying what makes innovations fail * and every other component of creating economic value through innovation.

302 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2002

Reviews

[Reid · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author is a long time employee of 3M and this novel centers mostly around his old-school, pre-internet time there developing physical products (cp software solutions). This book could have been written 30 years earlier (and probably should have been) as the insights and recommendations it affords aren't exactly targeted to the business landscape of today. This isn't a bad thing and even makes it a timeless overview of opportunities and challenges inherent across management and organizations. It's a great primer for navigating the political challenges, stagnation and culture of *any* bureaucracy.

That being said -- it's all pretty obvious. I can't recall any surprises or insights that changed my conceptualization of how to drive innovation within the context of someone else's organization. This isn't really a bad thing -- and in fact gives courage and confidence that outlined barriers and worst practices are obvious, frustrating and apparent to all of us. It's like finding an ally when you thought you were alone feeling frustrated.

The author is wordier than he needs to be. He could use a good editor to help him trim the page count by about 25% -- much of his suggestions and insights are repetitive between chapters and though thorough, there isn't much value added from it. I found the following passage relating to improving communication ironic: "...communication often lacks the required specificity. Too often what should take one sentence goes into extended and unrelated commentary. Too often more information is being provided than what is necessary. Too often the important part of the communication gets lost in detailed minutiae. Too often the original comment is repeated without adding any additional information." I chuckled wondering if the author copied and pasted feedback from one of his previous management reviews -- ipso facto.

The author cites researchers of innovation theory and offers his impressions on differing perspectives. I didn't think much value comes to the reader from theoretical research on the subject. More interesting to me would have been copious examples from real work organizations and challenges -- war stories. Since the author has only ever worked at 3M (this is the impression after reading) -- as a real-world comparative resource it is very lacking and the examples he does include are as previously stated, pre-dating the internet. The effect is somewhat like listening to an old man on a pourch in a rocking chair talking about his days driving innovation from the company that created post-it notes. Those of us reading today might not be so impressed by the innovation of post-it notes compared to Facebook, Uber, Space-X, etc.

[Nathan Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ho-hum.