Innovation Tournaments: Creating and Selecting Exceptional Opportunities

by Christian Terwiesch, Karl Ulrich

If you're like most business leaders, innovation now tops your corporate agenda. But despite all the talk and excitement about the importance of innovation, managers have so far found scant help for innovating in a systematic way that fuels consistent growth and sustained success.
In Innovation to the Core, Strategos CEO Peter Skarzynski and business strategist Rowan Gibson change all that. They share the accumulated wisdom from Strategos--the consulting firm Skarzynski co-founded with Gary Hamel that helps clients instill innovation into their very core. Drawing on a wealth of stories and examples, the book shows how companies of every stripe have overcome the barriers to successful, profitable innovation. You'll find parts devoted to crucial topics--such as how to organize the discovery process, generate strategic insights, enlarge your innovation pipeline, and maximize your return on innovation. Frequent hands-on tools--frameworks, checklists, probing questions--help you put the book's ideas into action.
Crafted in close coordination with Gary Hamel--the man who Fortune magazine has called "the world's leading expert on business strategy"--Innovation to the Core is the definitive fieldbook for making innovation a core competence in your organization.

Genres: Business, Entrepreneurship

290 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 12, 2009

Reviews

[Lawrence Chen · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are few courses about innovation at coursera. This book helps to think and make decision. Fair good, I am still reading it.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good guide on how to spark engagement in the area of innovation in medium and large size companies. This book and underlying course inspired the Global Innovation Tournament series at PayPal!

[Michael Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book. Provides practical approaches to managing an innovation capability in your company. Will use it as a reference for sure.

[E · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delving into innovation techniques

This is one of the better recent books on innovation, although it has a slightly misleading title. Yes, authors Christian Terwiesch and Karl T. Ulrich define and discuss innovation tournaments and their possible role in making organizations more successful at innovating. But the title is too limiting; innovation tournaments are really only a portion of what it offers. In addition to being written in an easy, familiar style and being full of examples and illustrations, the book is rich with tips, models and guidelines to help readers navigate all stages of the innovation process. Terwiesch and Ulrich candidly discuss the necessity of failure and the costs of developing innovations, but they’re also realistic when they describe the benefits. getAbstract recommends their book to managers who are responsible for evaluating ideas and fostering innovation.

[Fred Rose · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is just ok. It's definitely written from a large company standpoint and would be useful for people in strategic and technical management positions. Overall I think most companies will have a pretty specific type of innovation they want to encourage and will have their own filtering techniques. This book is worth a skim to maybe pick up a few ideas.