Innovation is a time-consuming process that involves invention as a beginning and a marketable service or product as an end. But innovation itself, once concluded, is not necessarily a constructive act as some innovations yield positive and some negative results. The way we recognize and develop innovation—so often a serendipitous and almost invisible act in its beginning—is thus a matter of primary importance in today's world where new thoughts and products play such a crucial role in economies across the globe. Nowhere is the general support structure required for success in innovation more starkly illuminated than in the fields of science and medicine, where human well-being is so manifestly at stake. In this work, which draws together the perspectives of a multidisciplinary group of professionals—medical doctors, innovation policy analysts, and academics in business management—Shantha Liyanage and his colleagues provide a thorough examination of the technology innovation process, and display its critical links with organizational functions, so the innovative capacities of organizations can be better prepared to meet the rapid changes of our age.

Evolutionary thinking has had a profound impact on theories of technological innovation and strategy. This volume explores how significant advancements made in evolutionary biology since the 1970s influence evolutionary approaches to these areas, with an emphasis on the role of serendipity and unprestateability in innovation and novelty creation.

Good luck isn’t just chance—it can be learned and leveraged—and The Serendipity Mindset explains how you can use serendipity to make life better at work, at home—everywhere. Many of us believe that the great turning points and opportunities in our lives happen by chance, that they’re out of our control. Often we think that successful people—and successful companies and organizations—are simply luckier than the rest of us. Good fortune—serendipity—just seems to happen to them. Is that true? Or are some people better at creating the conditions for coincidences to arise and taking advantage of them when they do? How can we connect the dots of seemingly random events to improve our lives? In The Serendipity Mindset, Christian Busch explains that serendipity isn’t about luck in the sense of simple randomness. It’s about seeing links that others don’t, combining these observations in unexpected and strategic ways, and learning how to detect the moments when apparently random or unconnected ideas merge to form new opportunities. Busch explores serendipity from a rational and scientific perspective and argues that there are identifiable approaches we can use to foster the conditions to let serendipity grow. Drawing from biology, chemistry, management, and information systems, and using examples of people from all walks of life, Busch illustrates how serendipity works and explains how we can train our own serendipity muscle and use it to turn the unexpected into opportunity. Once we understand serendipity, Busch says, we become curators of it, and luck becomes something that no longer just happens to us—it becomes a force that we can grasp, shape, and hone. Full of exciting ideas and strategies, The Serendipity Mindset offers a clear blueprint for how we can cultivate serendipity to increase innovation, influence, and opportunity in every aspect of our lives.

Originally published as: The Medici effect: breakthrough insights at the intersection of ideas, concepts, and cultures. Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business School Press, A2004.

You think you have a winning strategy. But do you? Executives are bombarded with bestselling ideas and best practices for achieving competitive advantage, but many of these ideas and practices contradict each other. Should you aim to be big or fast? Should you create a blue ocean, be adaptive, play to win—or forget about a sustainable competitive advantage altogether? In a business environment that is changing faster and becoming more uncertain and complex almost by the day, it’s never been more important—or more difficult—to choose the right approach to strategy. In this book, The Boston Consulting Group’s Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Janmejaya Sinha offer a proven method to determine the strategy approach that is best for your company. They start by helping you assess your business environment—how unpredictable it is, how much power you have to change it, and how harsh it is—a critical component of getting strategy right. They show how existing strategy approaches sort into five categories—Be Big, Be Fast, Be First, Be the Orchestrator, or simply Be Viable—depending on the extent of predictability, malleability, and harshness. In-depth explanations of each of these approaches will provide critical insight to help you match your approach to strategy to your environment, determine when and how to execute each one, and avoid a potentially fatal mismatch. Addressing your most pressing strategic challenges, you’ll be able to answer questions such as: • What replaces planning when the annual cycle is obsolete? • When can we—and when should we—shape the game to our advantage? • How do we simultaneously implement different strategic approaches for different business units? • How do we manage the inherent contradictions in formulating and executing different strategies across multiple businesses and geographies? Until now, no book brings it all together and offers a practical tool for understanding which strategic approach to apply. Get started today.

A fascinating deep dive on innovation from the New York Times bestselling author of How We Got To Now and Unexpected Life The printing press, the pencil, the flush toilet, the battery--these are all great ideas. But where do they come from? What kind of environment breeds them? What sparks the flash of brilliance? How do we generate the breakthrough technologies that push forward our lives, our society, our culture? Steven Johnson's answers are revelatory as he identifies the seven key patterns behind genuine innovation, and traces them across time and disciplines. From Darwin and Freud to the halls of Google and Apple, Johnson investigates the innovation hubs throughout modern time and pulls out the approaches and commonalities that seem to appear at moments of originality.

Create Business and Generate Profits inNew Markets through Innovation! “The best account I have read about how companies can enable and support internal entrepreneurs to achieve innovation-led growth.” Philip Kotler, S.C. Johnson & Son Professor of International Marketing, Kellogg School of Management “An essential resource for both private and public sector leaders seeking to align new business creation with an organization’s mission and strategy . . . and achieve results.” William J. Perry, former U.S. Secretary of Defense “Wolcott and Lippitz are not only insightful, they are spot on. This is exactly the book corporate leaders—from CEOs and functional executives to corporate entrepreneurial teams—need to help them navigate theexceptional challenges of organic growth and innovation.” Betsy Holden, Senior Advisor, McKinsey & Company, and former Co-CEO, Kraft Foods, Inc. About the Book: IBM reports $15 billion of annualnew revenues from 22 EmergingBusiness Opportunities. In 2008, $4 billion in revenues fromcompanywide innovation efforts allowedWhirlpool to maintain its top line, despiteglobal recession and the steep dropin housing markets. A DuPont business group leader,Ellen Kullman, backed an ambitious newbusiness creation program and laterbecame DuPont’s CEO. Each of these companies has learned how tocreate new businesses on a repeatable basis.In Grow from Within, two leading scholarsfrom the Kellogg School of Managementexplain how your company can discover theright approach to corporate entrepreneurshipand make it profitable. Taking innovation to the next level, corporateentrepreneurship is the process of buildingnew businesses within an established organization—new businesses that are distinctfrom the core company but that leveragesome of its most powerful assets.Grow from Within examines: The fundamentals of designing anew business The four dominant models ofcorporate entrepreneurship Ways to align your innovationprogram with your strategy Leadership requirements fordeveloping new businesses Innovation is critical to business successand growth, but it’s only the first step. Withoutstrategically driven processes to turninsights into growing businesses, even thebest ideas can fail. Creativity is often serendipitous;innovation management shouldnot be. Grow from Within provides the knowledgeyou need to conceive and design valuablenew businesses that breathe life into ideasand dramatically improve your top and bottomlines.