Imagine that you are the CEO of a software company. You know you compete in an environment that does not permit you to treat innovation as a secondary issue. But how should you manage your software innovation to get the most out of it? This book will provide you with the answer. Software innovation is multifaceted and the approaches used by companies can be very different. The team of authors that wrote this book took the assumption that there is no such thing as a universal software engineering process or innovation process. Some things work well for a certain company, others do not. The book is organized around what the authors call eight fundamental practice areas for innovation with software. Each practice area contains a number of activities that can help companies to master that practice area. It also contains industrial experience reports that illustrate the applicability of these practice areas in software companies and is structured in such a way that you can select and read only those practice areas that are relevant to your company. The book is written with an industrial target audience in mind. Its most important goal is to challenge companies by offering them a framework to become more innovation-driven, rather than engineering-driven. Intrigued? Here you will find details of what you and your company can do to understand, implement, and sustain continuous innovation.

There isn't a business that doesn't want to be more creative in its thinking, products and processes. In The Art of Innovation, Tom Kelley, partner at the Silicon Valley-based firm IDEO, developer of hundreds of innovative products from the first commercial mouse to virtual reality headsets and the Palm hand-held, takes readers behind the scenes of this wildly imaginative company to reveal the strategies and secrets it uses to turn out hit after hit. Kelley shows how teams: -Research and immerse themselves in every possible aspect of a new product or service -Examine each product from the perspective of clients, consumers and other critical audiences -Brainstorm best when they are focussed, being physical and having fun The Art of Innovation will provide business leaders with the insights and tools they need to make their companies the leading-edge top-rated stars of their industries.

Innovation may be the hottest discipline around today, in business circles and beyond. And for good reason. Innovation transforms companies and markets. It is the key to solving vexing social problems. And it makes or breaks professional careers. For all the enthusiasm the topic inspires, however, the practice of innovation remains stubbornly impenetrable. No longer. In this book the author draws on stories from his research and field work with companies like Procter & Gamble to demystify innovation. He presents a simple definition of innovation, breaks down the essential differences between types of innovation, and illuminates innovation's vital role in organizational success and personal growth. This unique hybrid of professional memoir and business guidebook also provides a powerful 28-day program for mastering innovation's key steps: (1) Finding insight, (2) Generating ideas, (3) Building businesses, and (4) Strengthening innovation prowess in workforces and organizations. Using several illustrative case studies and vignettes from a range of companies around the globe, this playbook teaches people how to turn themselves or their companies into true innovation powerhouses.

For those considering Extreme Programming, this book provides no-nonsense advice on agile planning, development, delivery, and management taken from the authors' many years of experience. While plenty of books address the what and why of agile development, very few offer the information users can apply directly.

“A brilliant travel guide to the coming world of AI.” —Jeanette Winterson What does it mean to be creative? Can creativity be trained? Is it uniquely human, or could AI be considered creative? Mathematical genius and exuberant polymath Marcus du Sautoy plunges us into the world of artificial intelligence and algorithmic learning in this essential guide to the future of creativity. He considers the role of pattern and imitation in the creative process and sets out to investigate the programs and programmers—from Deep Mind and the Flow Machine to Botnik and WHIM—who are seeking to rival or surpass human innovation in gaming, music, art, and language. A thrilling tour of the landscape of invention, The Creativity Code explores the new face of creativity and the mysteries of the human code. “As machines outsmart us in ever more domains, we can at least comfort ourselves that one area will remain sacrosanct and uncomputable: human creativity. Or can we?...In his fascinating exploration of the nature of creativity, Marcus du Sautoy questions many of those assumptions.” —Financial Times “Fascinating...If all the experiences, hopes, dreams, visions, lusts, loves, and hatreds that shape the human imagination amount to nothing more than a ‘code,’ then sooner or later a machine will crack it. Indeed, du Sautoy assembles an eclectic array of evidence to show how that’s happening even now.” —The Times

Annotation Great technology alone is rarely sufficient today to ensure a products success. At Microsoft, scenario-focused engineering is a customer-centric, iterative approach used to design and deliver the deeper experiences and emotional engagement customers demand in new products. In this book, youll discover the proven practices and lessons learned from real-world implementations of this approach, including:Why design matters: Understand a competitive landscape where customers are no longer satisfied by products that are merely useful, but respond instead to products they crave using. What it means to be customer focused: Recognize that you are not the customer, understand customers can have difficulty articulating what they want, and apply techniques that uncover their unspoken needs. How to iterate effectively: Implement a development system that is flexible enough to respond to early and continuous feedback, and enables experimentation with multiple ideas and feedback loops simultaneously. How to bridge the culture gap: In an engineering environment traditionally rooted in strong analytics, the ideas and practices for scenario-focused engineering may not be intuitive. Learn how to change team mindset from deciding what a product, service, or device will do, to discovering what customers actually want and what will work for them in real-life scenarios. Connections with Lean and Agile approaches: See the connections, gaps, and overlaps among the Lean, Agile, and Scenario-Focused Engineering methodologies, and achieve a more holistic view of software development.

Do you really understand what business value is? Information technology can and should deliver business value. But the Agile literature has paid scant attention to what business value means—and how to know whether or not you are delivering it. This problem becomes ever more critical as you push value delivery toward autonomous teams and away from requirements “tossed over the wall” by business stakeholders. An empowered team needs to understand its goal! Playful and thought-provoking, The Art of Business Value explores what business value means, why it matters, and how it should affect your software development and delivery practices. More than any other IT delivery approach, DevOps (and Agile thinking in general) makes business value a central concern. This book examines the role of business value in software and makes a compelling case for why a clear understanding of business value will change the way you deliver software. This book will make you think deeply about not only what it means to deliver value but also the relationship of the IT organization to the rest of the enterprise. It will give you the language to discuss value with the business, methods to cut through bureaucracy, and strategies for incorporating Agile teams and culture into the enterprise. Most of all, this book will startle you into new ways of thinking about the cutting-edge of Agile practice and where it may lead.