Creative Strategy: A Guide for Innovation (Columbia Business School Publishing) - Hardcover

Duggan Ph.D., William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0231160526 ISBN 13: 9780231160520

Publisher: Columbia Business School Publishing, 2012

Synopsis

William Duggan's 2007 book, Strategic Intuition, showed how innovation really happens in business and other fields and how that matches what modern neuroscience tells us about how creative ideas form in the human mind. In his new book, Creative Strategy, Duggan offers a step-by-step guide to help individuals and organizations put that same method to work for their own innovations.

Duggan's book solves the most important problem of how innovation actually happens. Other methods of creativity, strategy, and innovation explain how to research and analyze a situation, but they don't guide toward the next step: developing a creative idea for what to do. Or they rely on the magic of "brainstorming"―just tossing out ideas. Instead, Duggan shows how creative strategy follows the natural three-step method of the human brain: breaking down a problem into parts and then searching for past examples to create a new combination to solve the problem. That's how innovation really happens.

Duggan explains how to follow these three steps to innovate in business and any other field as an individual, a team, or a whole company. The crucial middle step―the search for past examples―takes readers beyond their own brain to a "what-works scan" of what others have done within and outside of the company, industry, and country. It is a global search for good ideas to combine as a new innovation. Duggan illustrates creative strategy through real-world cases of innovation that use the same method: from Netflix to Edison, from Google to Henry Ford. He also shows how to integrate creative strategy into other methods you might currently use, such as Porter's Five Forces or Design Thinking. Creative Strategy takes the mystery out of innovation and puts it within your grasp.

About this title

About the Author

Bill Duggan is a professor at Columbia Business School and the author of three recent books on innovation: Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement (2007); Creative Strategy: A Guide for Innovation (2012); and The Seventh Sense: How Flashes of Insight Change Your Life (2015).

Reviews

Columbia Business School lecturer Duggan's follow-up to his 2007 book, Strategic Intuition, is a practical guide to a big idea about innovation, aimed at individuals working by themselves, on teams, or in the context of a whole organization. The real difficulty with innovation is not the execution, but coming up with great ideas in the first place. Duggan uses the neuroscience of innovation to describe the brain's learning-and-memory process of analysis to come up with the best new ideas, and to break down the process step by step—applying the strategic intuition of the previous book in a systematic way to solve problems. The process is broken into three stages: problem identification; the what-works scan, a survey of how others have solved the same problem; and creative combination, which analyzes that process to arrive at a solution. Duggan politely but determinedly critiques the management tools selected by Bain & Co. for its annually compiled top 10 list, describing the pros and cons of various methods and why his is superior. A slim but persuasive guide to innovative thinking. Agent: Michael Bourret, Dystel & Goderich Literary Management. (Dec.)

Edition details

• Publisher: Columbia Business School Publishing
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0231160526
• ISBN 13: 9780231160520
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176