Built to Innovate: 9 Essential Practices to Wire Innovation Into Your Company's DNA

A Thinkers50 Best New Management Book for 2022

Launch your company to the top of its industry by driving and leveraging continuous innovation throughout your organization

It’s no secret that continuous innovation is the key to seizing and maintaining the competitive edge in today’s increasingly challenging business environment. Unfortunately, the process for achieving this holy grail of business has been a mystery―until now.

Built to Innovate delivers a proven system for building relentless innovation into your company’s DNA. Professor and former Dean of Executive Education at INSEAD and business innovation thought leader Ben M. Bensaou explores the essential practices of many of the world’s most innovative organizations―including BASF, AkzoNobel, Sabanci Group, Recruit Holdings, Ecocem, Starwood Hotels, Domino’s Pizza, Bayer, Marvel Studios, Allianz, and Fiskars―and demonstrates how you can leverage them in your own company. This practical guide shows how to:

• Build your execution and innovating engines
• Master the innovating perspective
• Launch the three processes of innovating
• Engage everyone in innovating
• Generate ideas from the front lines
• Empower coaches
• Create a culture of innovating
• Catalyze the innovating process
• Keep the ideas flowing

You’ll learn how to drive innovating in product design and creative use of technology―as well as business activities, such as business model redesign, customer service, distribution, finance, talent development, and sales.

The big question on the mind of every business leader today is: What can I do to create extra value for my company and the customers we serve? Built to Innovate provides everything you need to transform your organization into an innovating engine that continually produces new products and processes to generate enormous new value for you and for the customers you serve.

Ben M. Bensaou is a professor and former dean of Executive Education at INSEAD. As a business innovation consultant, he has helped some of the world’s leading companies build innovation into their corporate DNA. Bensaou has been a visiting professor at Harvard Business School, a research fellow at the Wharton School of Management, and a visiting scholar at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.  

Karl Weber is a writer and editor who specializes in business, politics, and social issues. He has worked with authors including former president Jimmy Carter and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus.