The best books for understanding how breakthrough innovation happens

This book tackles a core paradox of breakthrough innovations – that they often start in the mind of an ignored, discredited, and dismissed person. That person needs just enough resources to tinker with the idea for long enough that its potential can be realized. But to have a truly transformational impact, the idea has to go beyond just one person’s or a small team’s understanding to be embraced by a large number of champions and users. The book is an utterly delightful read, with innovations as varied as the steam engine and advanced biotech receiving Safi’s witty and knowledgeable touch.  

Carlson and Wilmot know whereof they speak when it comes to innovation. Using a methodology honed over a great deal of practice, their company SRI International, created many of the artifacts of modern life that we take utterly for granted, such as the computer mouse, high-definition television, innovations in banking and of course Siri, the voice enabled personal assistant that comes with iPhones. In this book (and their subsequent publications stemming from it), they lay out a systematic process that turns innovation from a haphazard process to a reliable capability.  

Just as no man is an island, today no company is, either. An ecosystem approach to strategy leads one to make entirely different choices about how to engage, when to compete, and which capabilities to build than you would make without such a perspective. The book engagingly opens with a retelling of the well-worn Kodak story, with a twist – it wasn’t that Kodak didn’t “get” digital, it's that they doubled down on printing when screens were getting good enough to make printing irrelevant. In its chapters, you’ll learn about how a mapping company survived when its competitors gave away its product for free; how Amazon got its Echo technology to be adopted as a standard by other organizations and how a clearly promising new ecosystem can be stillborn when its champions don’t play nicely together. 

Ed Catmull, together with his partner, George Lucas, completely changed the nature of animation with the founding of Pixar Animation Studios. This book outlines the philosophy and management practices that allowed Pixar to achieve unprecedented levels of success with its productions by shaking up traditional norms in the movie business. Sterling bits of advice include: It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It’s the manager’s job to make it safe for others to take them; the cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them; and a company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody.

This unusually formatted and provocative book delivers on its promise, which is that harnessing human imagination is a predictable, replicable process. Beginning with the first seeds of what gets our imaginations going (hint: when things aren’t chugging along as expected) to a recipe for how not to let those sparks die out as an idea becomes more mainstream, the book is chock full of examples, anecdotes, how to’s and more. And one of my favorite aspects of it is that it also has a multimedia guide to what BCG calls the “napkin gallery,” a virtual museum devoted to the earliest instances of some of the most important inventions ever commercialized.