Innovation Bibliography

Books

• Where good ideas come from: A natural history of innovation

  By: Steven Johnson
  ISBN: 0330295136
  TED Talk, RSA Animate (YouTube)

  A very engaging account of where the author believes are the most common contexts and environments where ideas and innovation flourish. Johnson's argument is that "a series of shared properties and patterns recur again again in unusually fertile environments" [p17]. He also emphasises the importance of cross-disciplinary contact, where ideas jump conceptual boundaries, and new ideas are created by people borrowing from other disciplines. He suggests that innovation occurs in the following 'patterns':

  1. The adjacent possible
  2. Liquid networks
  3. The slow hunch
  4. Serendipity
  5. Error
  6. Exaptation (new uses for old tools)
  7. Platforms

   

• Diffusion of Innovations

  By: Everett Rogers
  ISBN: 0743222091
  Wikipedia

  A well established book (several editions) and theory of how innovations diffuse through society.

• Investigations

  By: Stuart A. Kauffman
  ISBN: 019512104X

• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Products to Mainstream Customers

  By: Geoffrey A. Moore
  ISBN: 1841120634

  This book is about how innovators need convince people to take up their innovations (not to be confused with Moore's law, of a different author). Moore expands on the Rogers's model of the diffusion of innovations.

• The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

  By: Clayton M. Christensen
  ISBN: 0875845851
  Wikipedia

  To disrupt or to sustain? that is the question.

• The Ten Faces of Innovation

  By: Tom Kelley
  ISBN: 184668031X
  Official book website, IDEO microsite

  Kelly describes ten different types of people (or behaviours) that sustain an innovative environment.

  The Learning Personas

  1. The Anthropologist
  2. The Experimenter
  3. The Cross-Pollinator
  
  

  The Organizing Personas

  4. The Hurdler
  5. The Collaborator
  6. The Director
  
  

  The Building Personas

  7. The Experience Architect
  8. The Set Designer
  9. The Storyteller
  10. The Caregiver

Journals

• Strong ties, weak ties and islands: structural and cultural predictors of organizational innovation

  By: Martin Ruef
  Reference: Industrial and Corporate Change (2002) 11 (3): 427-449.