This book targets the needs of individuals engaged in quality management activities and enables them to incorporate new skills into their daily work. The author presents a serious study of creativity and innovation targeted at the needs of professionals engaged in quality management activities. It will appeal to even the most analytical thinkers in quality. Creativity, Innovation, and Quality clearly articulates five reasons why practitioners of quality management should be interested in innovation and the three central principles that underlie all the tools of creativity. Once you know the principles behind the tools, you can generate your own methods for creative thinking that are uniquely suited for your specific needs.

People with ideas are dreamers. People who get things done are doers. One doer is worth eight dreamers. There are three kinds of people who make up an innovator. There are inventors (people who have new and unique ideas), problem solvers (people who have ideas about how to correct a previous error) and entrepreneurs (people who transform ideas into realities). Put them altogether they spell "innovator." Most innovative books today focus on ways to create new and unique ideas; some of them also address problem-solving, but this is less than 10% of the methodologies that the innovator needs to master. The approaches used in this book transform an idea into reality, or to put it another way, deliver innovative products to make a profit for the organization and instill pride in its employees. This means that every step in the process needs to have innovation applied to it in order to meet the expectations and demands of today's sophisticated customer. This book is designed to help the reader and their organization complete the complex process of bringing a new product to market by presenting what is expected at each step in the cycle and providing step-by-step instructions on what to do at each specific step. In large to mid-sized organizations this book is designed to help each individual understand how they fit into the innovative cycle and explains why they should be more creative related to the work they do and more conscious of the contributions they can make. It emphasizes the importance of every individual contributing to the organization's innovative process. The book is designed to help the organization understand its Innovation Systems Cycle. In the early part of the cycle it focuses on weeding out projects that do not have the potential to produce value-added results to the stakeholders. By using the guidelines outlined in this book, an organization can reduce its new project failure rate by as much as 50% which should result in almost doubling the organization’s new product output thereby increasing profits by as much as 15%.

Creative solutions can be challenged and defended in the pursuit of profitability. But first, creativity must be demystified. A process that targets innovation provides leaders with just such a problem-solving approach. The goal is to produce high-quality ideas that are appropriate to the task - which means groups and organizations can implement them with less risk. Work with the targeted innovation process consists of activities in five areas: stating the problem in a way that encourages creative problem solving, learning and understanding different problem-solving styles, learning and understanding creative pathways and their relationship to problem solving, generating ideas, and evaluating those ideas. Targeted innovation reconciles creativity with management. Managers can use it to solve problems that meet their organization's call for innovative answers to current challenges.

Business Creativity and Innovation: Perspectives and Best Practices provides a foundation in the principles of innovation and introduces some cutting-edge concepts. The core of the book demonstrates how to generate, evaluate, and design ideas to solve business problems. Over the course of eight chapters, the anthology delivers insightful articles carefully selected from leading authors such as Clayton Christensen, Robert Cooper, Ram Charan, and Vijay Govindarajan, as well as award-winning case studies on how prominent businesses, including Apple and Google, have leveraged innovation. Readers explore insightful articles about driving business growth through innovation, creating a culture of innovation, identifying customer needs, and using innovation to solve customer problems. Additional readings examine idea evaluation, how to design new products and services to meet customer's needs, and the implementation of innovation processes and practices. Business Creativity and Innovation is ideal for undergraduate and graduate courses in business innovation, product development, strategic management, business leadership, entrepreneurship, design thinking, marketing strategy, and decision making. The book can also serve as an enlightening manual for businesses and corporations, as it provides a framework for managing the innovation process from which organizations of any size can benefit. A former business innovation executive for Fortune 100 companies like AT&T and Bank of America, Len Ferman earned his M.B.A. from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, M.A. in economics from Duke University, and B.S. in economics from Lehigh University. He is an adjunct professor of management at the University of North Florida, where he teaches courses he developed on business innovation, and is a faculty member of the American Management Association. He is the founder and managing director of Ferman Innovation and a frequent speaker on business innovation.

Although many leaders acknowledge and invest in creativity, we seldom see it hold a credible place in the business development process. Creativity at Work takes a practical approach to creativity, showing how to select practices to produce results and add value. The authors explain how to: * Understand the creative preferences of organizations, departments, work groups, and individuals * Identify and compare the different creativity profiles that describe specific purposes, practices, and people * Produce the desired results by developing the right practices * Blend creativity practices to meet the complex needs that characterize most work situations o Develop required creative abilities in a team and in oneself

It is impossible to measure the full economic and psychological benefits of the sewing machine, the polio vaccine, or the Internet. What we know is that these products have changed our lives for the better, generating net benefits well beyond the metric of corporate profits. As forces such as financial market volatility and fragmented markets demonstrate the fragility of the global economy, the imperative to develop products and services that contribute to the well-being of the many—rather than the few—is more pronounced than ever. In this book, A. Coskun Samli explores this imperative of an “innovation culture” and how it can be encouraged at all levels, from the individual to the nation or region. He argues that without a global innovation culture, committed to generating socially valuable products, we are likely to face a deteriorating quality of life, as wealth is concentrated at the top. Integrating insights from management, economics, policy, and psychology, Samli demonstrates how creativity can be channeled into innovation and innovation can be channeled, in turn, toward economic development. He discusses how national policies can be oriented toward encouraging such socially beneficial innovations as sustainable energy, communication technology, and medical discoveries. The aim is to promote the development of products and services that improve quality of life and generate profits for those who invest in them. He argues that all innovations, whether radical or incremental, must demonstrate social value in order to be truly profitable.