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Driving Eureka!: Problem-Solving with Data-Driven Methods & the Innovation Engineering System
Transform the art of innovation into a reliable system! System Driven Innovation enables you and everyone on your team to use innovation to work smarter, faster, and more creatively. It transforms innovation from a random act to a reliable science. This new mindset ignites confidence in the future. It enables the creation of bigger and bolder ideas―and turns them into reality faster, smarter, and more successfully. With this new mindset, innovation by everyone, everywhere, every day becomes the norm. The rapidly changing world becomes a tremendous opportunity to achieve greatness. Innovation Engineering defines innovation in two Meaningfully Unique. When a product, service, or job candidate is Meaningfully Unique customers are willing to pay more money for it. This links to the two simple truths in today’s If you’re Meaningfully Unique life is great! If you’re NOT Meaningfully Unique you’d better be cheap. Innovation Engineering is a new field of academic study and leadership science. It teaches how to apply the science of system thinking to strategy, innovation, and cooperation. Research finds that it helps to increase innovation speed (up to 6x) and decrease risk (by 30 to 80%). Innovation Engineering accelerates the creation and development of more profitable products and services. However, the bigger benefit may well lie in its ability to transform organizational cultures by enabling everyone to work smarter every day. What makes Innovation Engineering unique is that it’s grounded in data, backed by academic theory, and validated in real-world practice. Collectively, it’s the number one documented innovation system on earth. Over 35,000 people have been educated in Innovation Engineering classes, and more than $15 billion in innovations are in active development. In his book Driving Eureka! , best-selling business author Doug Hall presents the System Driven Innovation scientific method for enabling innovation by everyone, everywhere, every day. It’s the essential resource you need to enable yourself―and your team―to innovate, succeed, and do amazing things that matter, on a daily basis.
- GenresNonfictionBusiness
304 pages, Hardcover
Published November 13, 2018
10 people are currently reading
61 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 15, 2019
Mostly just trying to convince you that you need to send your company to the Eureka Ranch, this book doesn't do enough to explain the system. I mean there is plenty of words here, but it isn't organized well and there are no real world examples to help explain the process. I took away a few tidbits on questions to ask to provoke ideas and encouraging an innovation culture, but not enough for almost 300 pages.
May 16, 2019
To a great extent, this book felt like a sales pitch. I'm not saying that is necessarily a bad thing, since it appeared as if the pitch was for the sort of project whose worth I can appreciate, but there are a great many readers who may see the worth of data-driven methods as well as the importance of systems in encouraging and institutionalizing innovation that may not find this book to be as enjoyable because it reads like an extended (more than 250 page) long pitch for a company to send its employees to become innovation black belts and hire the author's firm as a consultant to help create innovation systems that will allow for powerful improvements in efficiency and to unleash creativity. Again, speaking personally, I saw a great deal of worth in what the author had to say, but felt him to be somewhat of a used-car salesman type, and that didn't always make me think of him as the most credible witness for his principles, especially when he tried to cast off blame for some of the failed companies that he and his firm had been associated with that had tried to become innovative too late in their death throes.
The contents of this book are divided into thirteen chapters and various supplemental material at the end. After an introduction, where the author gives two ways to read the book that did not include just reading it straight through (which I did), the author spends two chapters seeking to create an awareness of the problem of innovation, with a chapter on the problem that companies need innovation (1) and the solution of innovation engineering as an approach to this problem (2). After that the author writes about innovation agreement (3) and the need for a system (4). Then there are four chapters on various aspects of the learning mindset, including the three innovation principles (5), the create system (6), how to communicate the system (7), and how to commercialize it (8). There are then a few chapters to close the book that deal with aligning subsystems (9), how to deal with the collaboration cafe (10) and Merwyn rapid research (11) subsystems, working on patent return-on-investment (12), and creating an innovation culture within a company (13). After that there is a backstory on Dr. Deming, an interview with Kevin Cahill of the Deming Institute, some information on the author, an index, and an excerpt from one of the author's other books on his trip to the North Pole.
What should someone expect out of this book? For one, this book strongly urges companies to encourage innovation culture from the top down in several ways, by making communication much easier for everyone in the company, developing systems that allow for innovation projects of various kinds and that encourage failing fast and cheap and making such attempts painless for those who form ideas and explore possibilities for improvements. The author urges that companies pay attention to patents that make it possible to gain licensing income even on things that the company does not make itself that may prove profitable, and to understand that the vast majority of inefficiencies and variances are due to systems (which are the responsibility of management) and not due to errors by employees, who often are dealing with variable materials that are the source of most difficulties. Whether or not a reader seeks to become a customer of the author's firm, there is material here worth paying attention to, even if it is definitely true that the author (like many authors) likes to talk about himself too much in an attempt to paint himself as an authority on innovation engineering.
The contents of this book are divided into thirteen chapters and various supplemental material at the end. After an introduction, where the author gives two ways to read the book that did not include just reading it straight through (which I did), the author spends two chapters seeking to create an awareness of the problem of innovation, with a chapter on the problem that companies need innovation (1) and the solution of innovation engineering as an approach to this problem (2). After that the author writes about innovation agreement (3) and the need for a system (4). Then there are four chapters on various aspects of the learning mindset, including the three innovation principles (5), the create system (6), how to communicate the system (7), and how to commercialize it (8). There are then a few chapters to close the book that deal with aligning subsystems (9), how to deal with the collaboration cafe (10) and Merwyn rapid research (11) subsystems, working on patent return-on-investment (12), and creating an innovation culture within a company (13). After that there is a backstory on Dr. Deming, an interview with Kevin Cahill of the Deming Institute, some information on the author, an index, and an excerpt from one of the author's other books on his trip to the North Pole.
What should someone expect out of this book? For one, this book strongly urges companies to encourage innovation culture from the top down in several ways, by making communication much easier for everyone in the company, developing systems that allow for innovation projects of various kinds and that encourage failing fast and cheap and making such attempts painless for those who form ideas and explore possibilities for improvements. The author urges that companies pay attention to patents that make it possible to gain licensing income even on things that the company does not make itself that may prove profitable, and to understand that the vast majority of inefficiencies and variances are due to systems (which are the responsibility of management) and not due to errors by employees, who often are dealing with variable materials that are the source of most difficulties. Whether or not a reader seeks to become a customer of the author's firm, there is material here worth paying attention to, even if it is definitely true that the author (like many authors) likes to talk about himself too much in an attempt to paint himself as an authority on innovation engineering.
April 23, 2021
Driving Eureka is an excellent audiobook about putting Dr. Deming's teachings and theories to work developing innovation.
Read by the author in a personal style, you hear his passion for innovation as well as his deep admiration for Dr. Deming that may not have come through as well in a paper version of the book. The book is written so you listen to a chapter and then you reflect; which for me, is always the preferred method to listening to a chapter and then going on to the next.
Through this book, you will learn what innovation is, who Dr. Deming was and what was his system of profound knowledge, how to stimulate the innovation mindset, how to continuously learn and improve the innovation using the PDSA cycle, how to capitalize on innovation, techniques for managing innovation, techniques for managing innovation strategy, and what patents are and how to get them.
Although my background is innovating processes within industry not creating products, I was able to glean a great deal of insight into the innovation process and found very useful nuggets within this book that can be applied to process innovation specifically the section on how to spark creative ideas. Additionally, it was great to have a book that didn't simply discuss Dr. Deming's theories but showed how to put them into practice with well-told stories about the author's father, a Deming success story, and the author himself, working with one of Deming's disciples.
Some of the other sections, such as patent info, were interesting, but may not be needed by me in particular. It was still good to hear and get a basic understanding.
My only critique about this book is that at times it seemed like a sales pitch for Innovative Engineering. I understand that was the purpose behind the book, but for me it became distracting at times when he would cover a topic and then say "that is why Innovation Engineering is needed".
All in all this was a very good book that offers a lot of opportunity for thought and application.
Read by the author in a personal style, you hear his passion for innovation as well as his deep admiration for Dr. Deming that may not have come through as well in a paper version of the book. The book is written so you listen to a chapter and then you reflect; which for me, is always the preferred method to listening to a chapter and then going on to the next.
Through this book, you will learn what innovation is, who Dr. Deming was and what was his system of profound knowledge, how to stimulate the innovation mindset, how to continuously learn and improve the innovation using the PDSA cycle, how to capitalize on innovation, techniques for managing innovation, techniques for managing innovation strategy, and what patents are and how to get them.
Although my background is innovating processes within industry not creating products, I was able to glean a great deal of insight into the innovation process and found very useful nuggets within this book that can be applied to process innovation specifically the section on how to spark creative ideas. Additionally, it was great to have a book that didn't simply discuss Dr. Deming's theories but showed how to put them into practice with well-told stories about the author's father, a Deming success story, and the author himself, working with one of Deming's disciples.
Some of the other sections, such as patent info, were interesting, but may not be needed by me in particular. It was still good to hear and get a basic understanding.
My only critique about this book is that at times it seemed like a sales pitch for Innovative Engineering. I understand that was the purpose behind the book, but for me it became distracting at times when he would cover a topic and then say "that is why Innovation Engineering is needed".
All in all this was a very good book that offers a lot of opportunity for thought and application.
November 16, 2018
"Eureka" was Stevo's Business Book of the Week, as selected by Stevo's Book Reviews on the Internet. See my other reviews and recommendations at http://forums.delphiforums.com/stevo1.
June 2, 2020
The Innovation Engineering system is remarkable. This book, however, is basically a sales pitch for the system and doesn't teach you how to do it. Go sign up for a quick start workshop instead.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews