6 Books That Can Spark Innovation

Innovation can often be the most important driver of a business' growth because it allows a company to always offer customers what they need. If you're on an entrepreneurial journey, you might find it helpful to check out a few books that can help you avoid the innovation pitfalls that invariably occur along the way.

Consider making these books part of your end-of-summer reading list so you can get started on your road to innovation.

Blue Ocean Shift: Beyond Competing – Proven Steps to Inspire Confidence and Seize New Growth by W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne

After examining 150 successful strategic moves across 30 industries spanning more than 100 years, the authors came up with the theory that tomorrow’s leading companies will succeed not by dueling with competitors, but by creating an uncontested new market space (referred as “blue oceans”) ripe for growth.

Blue Ocean Shift is the follow up to the duo’s book Blue Ocean Strategy, which presented a systematic approach to successfully creating and capturing blue oceans. Blue Ocean Shift includes research and examples of how leaders in diverse industries and organizations created new markets by applying the processes and tools outlined in the Blue Ocean Strategy book.

By combining the insights of human psychology with practical market-creating tools and real-world guidance, the authors provide a step-by-step guide to shift yourself, your team or your organization to new heights of confidence, market creation and growth.

Whether you are a startup or a large established company, this book can help you learn how to shift your organization from a “red ocean” crowded with competition to a blue ocean. It includes resources you need — from ideas in practice and studies to teaching materials and tools that can help you make your blue ocean journey a success.

Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs by Larry Keeley

People often consider innovation solely as a new product development, which is quite a narrow view of the concept. The book upends traditional thinking about innovation and serves as a foundation for a broader point of view. The framework in the book provides a useful and practical way of identifying new sources of innovation.

Keeley determined ten types of innovation using a list of more than 2,000 successful ideas, including Cirque du Soleil, the Ford Model-T and many more. The book provides various insights to diagnose innovation patterns within industries, identify innovation opportunities and evaluate businesses’ performance against their competitors. Keeley also details how you can implement the provided innovation principles to bring about meaningful and sustainable growth at your organization.

The Innovator's Method: Bringing the Lean Startup into Your Organization by Nathan Furr and Jeff Dyer

Have you ever come up with an idea for a new product or service, but didn't take any action because you thought it would be too risky? Or you thought of changing the way you develop or provide something, but you didn’t know how to take the next step? This book can help you overcome those challenges and apply your innovative ideas to achieve success.

Based on their research inside corporations and startups, Furr and Dyer developed the innovator’s method, an end-to-end process for creating, refining and bringing ideas to market. Whether you’re launching a startup, leading an established one or simply working on a new product or service, it can help you lower failure rates and risk.

The innovator's method focuses on how to test, validate and implement ideas with lean, design and agile techniques. It helps you decide when and how to apply the tools to your business and to determine the best business model for your new offering.

Monetizing Innovation: How Smart Companies Design the Product around the Price by Madhavan Ramanujam and Georg Tacke

Radically improving the odds that your innovation will succeed can often just be a matter of removing the guesswork. This can happen when you put customer demand and willingness to pay in the driver’s seat and design the product around the price.

Monetizing Innovation presents a practical approach that can be adopted by any organization, in any industry. The authors believe that companies should rethink the practices that have caused them to lose money and follow the new paradigm of innovation — stop hoping to monetize and start believing that you will.

In Monetizing Innovation, the authors distill the lessons learned during 30 years of advising companies on monetization and over 10,000 projects into a practical, nine-step approach. The book’s illustrative case studies show how some of the world’s most innovative companies, like LinkedIn, Uber, Porsche, Draeger, Swarovski and big pharmaceutical firms have used principles outlined in this book.

The Invisible Advantage: How to Create a Culture of Innovation by Soren Kaplan

Kaplan explains how to create a culture of innovation in any organization that promotes free thinking as a source of sustainable value and an entrepreneurial spirit. The book includes practical tips, case studies, real-world examples and plenty of valuable information for team leaders and executives.

Do you have some fantastic ideas, but don’t know how to turn them into practical strategies? Then this book can help you uncover the unique, hidden drivers of innovation and then introduce fresh intuitive approaches tailored to your organization's specific environment.

Mapping Innovation: A Playbook for Navigating a Disruptive Age by Greg Satell

Mapping Innovation offers a simple and powerful approach to developing a strategy, providing an informative overview of the different types of creative entrepreneurship. The book includes stories about the greatest inventions of the past century that can help readers understand the innovation process in practical and relatable terms.

Satell details the processes that helped some of the greatest innovations advance from inception to world-changing products — and shows you how to replicate their success. “It’s about asking the right questions so that you can apply the right strategies to the problems you need to solve,” he writes.

The author also reveals the four models of innovation: basic research, breakthrough innovation, sustaining innovation, and disruptive innovation — that provide a framework — the Innovation Matrix — for discovering which “type” of innovation process best suits the problem you need to solve. 

I'd love to hear about any books I've missed — if you have a favorite book about innovation, please share it in the comments!