Scalable Innovation: A Guide for Inventors, Entrepreneurs, and IP Professionals by Eugene Shteyn

by Eugene Shteyn

Innovation is a primary source of economic growth, and yet only one idea out of 3,000 becomes a successful product or service. Scalable A Guide for Inventors, Entrepreneurs, and IP Professionals introduces a model for the innovation process, helping innovators to understand the nature and timing of opportunities and risks on the path to success. The authors apply systems thinking to discover real-life challenges, and provide tools for turning these challenges into opportunities for practical, scalable innovation. The book is organized into four "Prologue "exposes key barriers to creativity and innovation. It provides telling examples of how years in school and at work make us accept common wisdoms that are likely to hurt our chances to create or take advantage of breakthrough innovations. "Section I" introduces a system model for understanding technology and solving problems. It shows how to connect the model with real-life solutions, including their reflection in patents. "Section II" introduces tools for thinking outside the box, considers the role of luck in success of inventions, and presents tools for flexible thinking and imagination development. "Section III" discusses system dynamics, including how the elements of systems evolve, creating space for invention and scalable innovation. The authors illustrate this with case studies from various industries and technology areas. They analyze several landmark innovations in detail, revealing surprising and essential elements common to all of them.This book presents simple principles that form the foundation of successful innovation, enabling practitioners to anticipate and expedite the creation of value through the guided innovation process. It outlines the most common barriers in reasoning and false beliefs about innovation that impede practitioners from seeing problems in a new light and offers specific ways of dealing with these barriers. It also provides specific tools for quickly identifying essential present and missing elements of systems underpinning high-value problems and their proposed solutions, resulting in an accelerated innovation development and evaluation cycle.

Paperback

First published June 3, 2013

Reviews

[Justohidalgo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading the prologue of "Scalable Innovation: A Guide for Inventors, Entrepreneurs, and IP Professionals" could save you the effort and time waste of having to buy and read too many of the currently available books on creativity. It is a well-done, though maybe long description of the current state of creativity, invention and innovation from social, cultural and biological standpoints. But that is just the prologue.

The following 30 chapters comprise one of the best books I have read on creativity, certainly in the Top 3. And the main reason is that Eugene Shteyn and Max Shtein's approach to this topic is quite different to what most other authors have tried, what I call a "pragmatic approach", where the effort to find and analyze the key problem to solve is more important than actually solving it. This starts by explaining how systems thinking can help at fully understanding the current state of a specific market, industry, or business, and get a grasp of what could be its future; the latter is not magic: it takes the advantage of modeling the problem in a way where it can be compared to similar problems in the past and present, how they were, or are being solved, and how they evolve. Chapter 4's examples of Edison's light bulb or Apple's 30-Pin connector, or the continuous reference to eBooks, are mind-opening cases.

But Systems Thinking is just part of what the authors propose. Specific tools that can be used in and outside of the model are fully explained. Some of these tools are based on deep invention theories, but have been re-engineered and simplified so readers do not need to spend years studying those. I personally love the Three Magicians, and, more specifically, how the Second one ("Climb-on-the-roof") help get away from classic engineering thinking, too focused on relating the different existing elements instead of trying to see the big picture. Another great tool presented in the book, the STM technique, has helped me quite a few times to break my self-imposed constraints by looking beyond the current limits of existing products in order to find potential business opportunities.

The last part of the book was quite surprising when I read it, since it matched the stages of the well-known technology adoption lifecycle developed by Everett Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations, 5th Edition) and others and made famous by Geoffrey Moore (Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers), with the systems model defined in the first chapters. This enables an even further understanding of how technologies and product innovations work. Eugene and Max help us throughout this amazing "tour de force" by using several real cases of products, companies, inventors and ideas. I have already used it in my own company during business validation processes to see how far off our own prospections were compared to this approach.

I had the pleasure of having Eugene as my professor and mentor in innovation and creativity techniques, and I have merged his teachings with my own research and experiences to use and teach creativity and innovation for more than five years. But with this book the authors take one step further, enabling many more people to understand this world at a deeper and more complex level and, most importantly for me, to spread the word of a down-to-earth, more effective approach to creativity.

[Mitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best texts I have read on innovation.