Tuesday, February 21, 2017

The Conundrum of Innovation

The Innovation Race: How to Change a Culture to Change the Game – Andrew Grant and Gaia Grant (Wiley)

Full confession: Since it arrived on my doorstep, I have picked this book up, struggled through some of the concepts it present and put it down. Later I would return, pick it up and put it down. It reached the point where it became a challenge for me to work my way through the book and develop a meaningful review.

As I worked my way through the ups and downs, I finally reached the conclusion that the problem I have, is understanding exactly what innovation really is. Innovation is a word/concept that gets tossed around by all sorts of business folks, but what does it really mean?! Naturally I went where I always go; the dictionary.


Innovation – The action or process of innovating. Really!? Alright, how about this one- change, alteration, revolution, upheaval, transformation, metamorphosis, breakthrough, modernization. Well that certainly didn’t solve the problem I faced.

So I shifted the focus to what is truly at the root of innovation? Think about the concept of innovation; in the process of “innovating” you are often simultaneously causing obsolescence? Now ask what role does disruption play in the process? How do we find that magical delta between innovation and obsolescence? Are you getting the drift here? The Grants concept of the pace of innovation and the so-called purpose driven route to innovation certainly is a challenging one. Are we innovating just for the sake of innovating and is that really serving the needs or fixing the problems that lead to the desire to innovate.

Not sue I have come up with a helpful review here, other than to say that this book is certainly challenging and thought provoking.

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