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Original ideas start in a person´s mind, but the environment where they operate is crucial for the capture and development of these ideas. Equally important is the interaction with others in developing and evaluating ideas, as a brilliant idea only influences the world if it is put into use.This book hopes to inspire the team leader, innovation manager or research group leader. It deals with the delicate balance of managing and controlling intellectual property in a collaborative environment. Insights on how new inventions can be evaluated are offered. Following the whole cycle of innovation from a creative idea to where a product or service can be put on the market, examples illustrate how an innovative environment can be created and maintained. Strategies and solutions based on the science of team development are presented and leadership models for the different phases of group development are provided.The book will be of interest to researchers, academics, product developers, entrepreneurs, and advanced students in the fields of technology and innovation management and entrepreneurship and small business management but also for leadership.

Discover how you and your company can work less, be more productive, and make time for what's really important with the support of this life-changing book.​ The idea of success embraced by the global economy means being always-on, never missing an opportunity, and outworking your peers. But working ever-longer hours is't sustainable for companies or individuals. Fatigue-induced mistakes, whether in the operating room or factory line, cost companies billions, and overwork alienates and burns out valuable employees. But what if there is another way? Shorter tells the story of entrepreneurs and leaders all over the world who have discovered how to shrink the workweek without cutting salaries or sacrificing productivity or revenues. They show that by reducing distractions, eliminating inefficiencies, and creating time for high-quality focus and collaboration, 4-day workweeks can boost recruitment and retention, make leaders more thoughtful and companies more sustainable, and improve work-life balance. Using design thinking, a business and product development process pioneered in Silicon Valley, futurist and consultant Alex Pang creates a step-by-step guide for readers to redesign their workdays.

This book describes the conversational competencies that enable innovative entrepreneurial teams to create new products and ventures, and it presents several exercises and games to help readers master these conversational moves.Based on 6 years of detailed empirical analysis of teams at the forefront of technological breakthroughs and new venture creation, this book shows you how high-performance teams verbally accomplish their work. Through engaging examples, exercises, and descriptions, it enables entrepreneurs to develop the conversational competencies that can help them create new products and ventures. The book includes a technique for making interpretation visible that enables teams to navigate pivots in the innovation process. It also includes the materials and instructions for the Toasted Marshmallow game designed to help entrepreneurial teams fail forward. The Innovator's Discussion enables readers and their team mates to build a conversational advantage. The reader will gain both a practical and theoretical understanding of the role of conversation in the context of entrepreneurial work. It is invaluable for aspiring and established entrepreneurs as well as for educators and those wanting to learn more about entrepreneurship, innovation, and high-performance teams.

'How to Do Great Work Without Being an Asshole, a new book by designer Paul Woods, is a practical, illustrated guide that does exactly what the title suggests: It shows you how to be both creative and act like a grown-up at work.'- Fast CompanyIt's long been an accepted, almost celebrated, fact of the creative industries that long hours, chaotic workflows and egotistical colleagues are just the price you pay to produce great work. In fact, this toxic culture is the enemy of creativity, and with greater accountability and transparency in the industry - and more choice for young talent - than ever before, this unsustainable way of doing business is a ticking time bomb.This is a straight-talking, fun read for all creatives: Director or junior, at an agency or client-side, working in design, advertising, publishing, fashion or film.Packed with anecdotes, self-analysis flowcharts (are YOU the asshole?!), humorous graphics, and helpful exercises and action plans for better working practices.Simple strategies can easily be implemented to create a happier, more productive team and - importantly - BETTER WORK!Read this guide to develop the ultimate creative process and bring your productivity and teamwork to a new level.How to Do Great Work Without Being an Asshole addresses hot topics like:Building a better office cultureDealing with egosMeeting etiquetteBest practices for pitching and scopingMaking the most of creative briefingsHow to give constructive, clear feedbackGiving better presentations How to approach workloads and long hoursGuidelines for good client relationshipsHiring and being hiredFiring and being firedAnd much more!

Amidst the deluge of advice for businesspeople, there lies an overlooked tool, a key to thriving in today's fast-paced, unpredictable environment: improvisation. In Getting to'Yes And'veteran improv performer, university professor, CEO, and consultant Bob Kulhan unpacks a form of mental agility with powers far beyond the entertainment value of comedy troupes. Drawing on principles from cognitive and social psychology, behavioral economics, and communication, Kulhan teaches readers to think on their feet and approach the most typical business challenges with fresh eyes and openness. He shows how improv techniques such as the'Yes, and'approach, divergent and convergent thinking, and focusing on being present can translate into more productive meetings, swifter decisions, stronger collaboration, positive conflict resolution, mindfulness, and more. Moving from the individual to the organizational level, Kulhan compiles time-tested teaching methods and training exercises into an instrumental guide that readers can readily implement as a party of one or a company of thousands.

The action-based guide to powerful, influential organizational storytelling Circle of the 9 Muses captures the best practices of the world's most influential story consultants and knowledge workers to help you find, tell, and draw value from your organizational stories as impetus for action. This rich toolbox is loaded with fun, graphical instructions and dozens of unique, replicable, and facilitated processes that require no special training or expertise. You'll discover your organization's hidden narrative assets, use different templates and frameworks to tell the stories of your past, present, and future and then draw team members into rich meaning-making dialogue that translates into action. These activities can be exercised in endless permutations, and expert advice steers you toward the right activity for a specific purpose, including managing change, setting strategy, onboarding, defining the brand, engaging supporters or customers, merging cultures, building trust, and much more. Organizational storytelling is a powerful managerial tool and an essential change management technique. This is about your influence as a leader. Knowing the right story to tell and how to deliver it effectively gives you and your organization enormous influence, and helps connect employees to strategy by providing understanding, belief, and motivation in their personal contribution. This book is the ultimate field guide to becoming an influential storyteller, with concrete, actionable guidance toward all the storytelling fundamentals. Identify your organization's'narrative assets'Craft an elegant, well-constructed organizational story Capture, bank, and share stories with extraordinary engagement Facilitate a dialogue to draw out meaning and induce change The growing interest surrounding organizational storytelling has many change agents focused on'trying to tell better stories,'but goals are useless without a plan of action. Circle of the 9 Muses helps you weave narrative wisdom into organizational development activities, engaging employees and driving change.

Creativity and Marketing: The Fuel for Success presents a diverse collection of theoretical analysis, real world evidence, and case study applications to synthesize emerging studies on how creativity is important for marketing success. Exploring themes in strategic marketing, creativity in management and communication as well as creativity in new product development, Creativity and Marketing examines a wide range of cutting-edge developments at the intersection of marketing and creative practice, including brand management, social media management, consumer behaviour, and value creation. This collection will bridge theory and practice in a fast moving and exciting field and will provide scholars of marketing, branding and consumer behaviour with lessons and strategies to implement in their own fields.

Reignite your creative-thinking skills to produce innovative solutions Organizational Creativity: A Practical Guide for Innovators and Entrepreneurs by Gerard J. Puccio, John F. Cabra, and Nathan Schwagler, is a compelling new text designed to transform the reader into a creative thinker and leader. Arguing that creativity is an essential skill that must be developed, the authors take a highly practical approach, providing strategies, tools, and cases to help readers hone their creative abilities. Whether students are preparing to become entrepreneurs or to work in an established firm, this text will help them survive and thrive in an era of innovation and change.

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%.

This title was first published in 2000. Economic competitiveness depends on having the smartest workforce possible. Organizations who want to survive and grow need to be open to new ways of uncovering and developing their people's abilities. Profiting from Multiple Intelligences in the Workplace turns Howard Gardner's revolutionary theory of multiple intelligences into user-friendly tools for understanding and assessing success in everyone from CEOs to cleaners. It provides a complete system for: the examination of staff needs matching applicants and job specifications successful interviewing and induction effective supervision focused training and development. The results not only allow the identification of individual skills but also uncover the mosaic of skills needed for multiskilling, multitasking and efficient teamwork. No other book provides a method of translating the theory of multiple intelligences into workplace practice and, unlike other books which centre on only one intelligence (for example emotional intelligence), the inventories presented here work towards a balance between traditional skills, general competencies and social skills.

For the past two decades, creativity and innovation have been viewed by researchers as critical to organizational success and survival. Understanding the factors that facilitate or inhibit creativity and innovation at the individual level has been the focus of much of the research in this area. However, while earlier work on teams considered the working dynamics of the group as a context variable with individual creativity the outcome, research now emphasizes group creativity as the intended, desired outcome. This shift in thought has occurred because many of the problems routinely facing organizations are complex and cannot be solved by a single individual at the helm. Edited by Roni Reiter-Palmon, Team Creativity and Innovation provides readers with a state-of-the-art review of the major concepts and current research related to the demonstrable benefits of team creativity and innovation. In this volume, Reiter-Palmon and contributors explore such topics as team collaboration and communication, trust and psychological safety, team diversity, social networks, conflict, organizational learning, and more as a way to introduce readers to the issues that matter most in today's modern, forward-thinking workplace.

Making Innovation Last considers the long term success of a firm. Authored by a trio of top international scholars who present pioneering new work on what it takes to create long term growth, the book examines the internal conditions that are likely to encourage sustainable innovation, as well as what a culture of innovation should look like.

This helpful book explains how anyone can develop in themselves a visionary leadership. Most leaders today have not developed the visionary capacity necessary to look ahead and explore strategic futures. Or at least their so-called vision is not one that compels, inspires, and energizes their people. Vision may sound like a rare quality, attainable by only a select few--but nothing could be further from the truth.Strategy and leadership expert Rob-Jan de Jong describes how it simply boils down to sharpening two key skills: 1) the ability to see things early, and 2) the power to connect the dots. Using the author's trademarked FuturePriming process, which helps distinguish signal from noise, readers geared toward fine-tuning these two essential skills will discover how to:Tap into their imagination and open themselves up to the unconventionalBecome better at seeing things earlyFrame the big-picture view that provides direction for the futureCommunicate your vision in a way that engages others and provokes actionWhen you can anticipate change before your competitors, you create enormous strategic advantage. That's what visionaries do, and now so can you.

Creativity, innovation and change are vital to the development and sustainability of all organizations. Yet, questions remain about exactly how novelty comes about, and what dynamic processes are involved in its emergence? Ideas of emergence and process, drawn from a variety of different philosophic traditions, have been the focus of increasing attention in management and organization studies. These issues are brought to bear on novelty and innovation in this volume by examining new organizational and product development processes, whether planned or unplanned. The contributions in this volume offer both theoretical insights and empirical studies on, inter alia, innovation, music technology, haute cuisine, pharmaceuticals and theatre improvisation. In doing so, they throw light on the importance of emergence, improvisation and learning in organizations, and how both practitioners and scholars alike can best understand their own assumptions about process. In addition, the volume includes general essays on process perspectives in organization studies.