Is there any doubt in your mind about the importance of innovation? Do you feel that innovation is vital to the future of your company? Then perhaps you've already discovered that the process of innovation is difficult to manage. It's risky, expensive, and unpredictable. Further, some leaders look at the innovations that come from companies like Apple or P&G, and think, "We don't have people or resources like theirs. We can't do that kind of magic." But the truth is that Apple's success, or P&G's, or Toyota's, isn't due to magic; it's because they follow a disciplined innovation process. So the best way for your firm to become an innovator is to adopt a systematic approach applies the best tools, and also goes beyond tools to help you manage the large scale risks and opportunities that your organization faces. This system elevates innovation to what it really should be, a strategic asset to your organization. Defining that system is the intent behind The Innovation Master Plan.

The first and only guide to diagnosing and dealing with the hidden or covert factors that can ruin even the most meticulously planned change processes. Organizational change initiatives often fail because they focus exclusively on the rational, overt aspects of change, overlooking the powerful role played by concealed or irrational factors. It’s well known that these covert processes—such as hidden agendas, blind spots, office politics, tacit assumptions, secret hopes, wishes and fears—frequently sabotage change efforts, but up until now nobody has offered a rigorous, consistent way of identifying and dealing with them. Drawing on over thirty years of experience as an organizational change consultant to global corporations and government agencies, Robert J. Marshak shows precisely how to bring these hidden processes to light and deal with their negative impact. Marshak identifies five different dimensions of covert processes, presents an integrated model to explain the ultimate source of all of them, and shows how to diagnose whether any covert processes might be at work in your organization. He then offers specific tools and techniques for engaging and managing these “under-the-table” processes and for creating the kind of organizational environment in which such hidden dynamics are unable to flourish. Covert Processes at Work is a comprehensive and practical guide that managers, leaders, and consultants can use to deal with the hidden dynamics that are often at the root of many organizational problems. “Adding these tools…will take both your practice and your clients to a whole new level of capability and impact.” —Karen Boylston, PhD, Managing Director, Duke Corporate Education

Two experts show that innovation is a skill that can be learned and describe eight essential practices for achieving success. Innovation is the ruling buzzword in business today. Technology companies invest billions in developing new gadgets; business leaders see innovation as the key to a competitive edge; policymakers craft regulations to foster a climate of innovation. And yet businesses report a success rate of only four percent for innovation initiatives. Can we significantly increase our odds of success? In The Innovator's Way, innovation experts Peter Denning and Robert Dunham reply with an emphatic yes. Innovation, they write, is not simply an invention, a policy, or a process to be managed. It is a personal skill that can be learned, developed through practice, and extended into organizations. Denning and Dunham identify and describe eight personal practices that all successful innovators perform: sensing, envisioning, offering, adopting, sustaining, executing, leading, and embodying. Together, these practices can boost a fledgling innovator to success. Weakness in any of these practices, they show, blocks innovation. Denning and Dunham chart the path to innovation mastery, from individual practices to teams and social networks.

he GInI Applied Innovation Master Book® is a comprehensive book written for working business professionals seeking to understand the diverse array of concepts associated with business innovation. The book presents these concepts in such a way that the business professional can understand them in the context of the whole of innovation practice, so that they can put them to effective use at each level of the organization. The book is structured in a way that first presents the foundational knowledge of business innovation and then examines the respective work of Innovation Professionals, Innovation Managers, Innovation Strategists, and Chief Innovation Officers, as well as presents a detailed understanding of the Design Thinking process and its associated Design Methods. In this way, the book can be applied at the differing stages of the professional's business career.

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%.

A framework for overcoming the six types of innovation killers Everybody wants innovation—or do they? Creative People Must Be Stopped shows how individuals and organizations sabotage their own best intentions to encourage "outside the box" thinking. It shows that the antidote to this self-defeating behavior is to identify which of the six major types of constraints are hindering innovation: individual, group, organizational, industry-wide, societal, or technological. Once innovators and other leaders understand exactly which constraints are working against them and how to overcome them, they can create conditions that foster innovation instead of stopping it in its tracks. The author's model of constraints on innovation integrates insights from the vast literature on innovation with his own observations of hundreds of organizations. The book is filled with assessments, tools, and real-world examples. The author's research has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, London Guardian and San Jose Mercury News, as well as on Fox News and on NPR's Marketplace Includes illustrative examples from leading organizations Offers a practical guide for bringing new ideas to fruition even within a previously rigid organizational culture This book gives people in organizations the conceptual framework and practical information they need to innovate successfully.