The Heart of Innovation: A Field Guide for Navigating to Authentic Demand

Four innovation experts from the startup world, large enterprises, nonprofits, and academia come together to reveal the secret of uncovering authentic demand to build successful innovations.

Books on innovation mostly focus on how to nurture innovative cultures and brainstorm ideas. The Heart of Innovation is the first popular book to concretely delve into what innovations really are and how to create them. Many attempts at innovation fail because customers turn out to be indifferent. The key to success is to uncover unmet authentic demand; what customers cannot be indifferent to. Through fresh case studies, ranging from how SoulCycle revolutionized the fitness industry, to how IBM built an $8 billion business on the Web, to a single mother ending abuse in a slum in Africa, The Heart of Innovation explores how authentic demand is often hidden or taken for granted.

The first half of the book explores cases where people accidentally found their way to meeting an unmet authentic demand—or failed to. The second half of the book provides a field guide to methodically identifying and building products, services, and businesses around authentic demand.

At Georgia Tech, IBM, and elsewhere, the authors have worked with scores of startups and large companies, developing a unique methodology that unpacks the “black box” of authentic demand and shows innovators how to search for it, recognize it, and create situations for their customers that catalyze it. They explore the differences, and different challenges, to the three types of innovation—incremental improvement, company transformation, and radical “formative” innovation.

Authors Chanoff, Furst, Sabbah, and Wegman take innovators and people who work with them on a new journey through innovation. Their fresh case studies, from IBM’s entry to the Web, to a single mother in a slum in Kenya, make The Heart of Innovation as obsessively readable as it is informative.

If customers are already pulling your innovation from your hands, you don’t need this book. Otherwise, reach for The Heart of Innovation.

Matt Chanoff is a San Francisco-based angel investor and co-founder with Merrick of the startup studio Flashpoint.  He has served on the boards of early stage companies in logistics and cyber security, and currently sits on eight nonprofit boards in the areas of poverty, media, and education.He has a Master’s of Arts degree in International Economics and Politics from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Dr. Merrick Furst is a Distinguished Professor and the Director of the Center for Deliberate Innovation at Georgia Tech. He founded Flashpoint@GT, a first-of-its-kind startup engineering studio that developed formative leaders and exceptional technology startups. Merrick was the president of the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley, and before that was a professor and dean at Carnegie Mellon.
Dr. Mark Wegman is an IBM fellow, IBM’s highest technical honor with more than 100 publications and over 16,000 citations, primarily in algorithms, information theory, compilers and software engineering.  He is also an ACM and IEEE Fellow, a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Distinguished Alumnus of UC Berkeley.
Dr. Daniel Sabbah was the CTO and General Manager, Next Generation Platform, at IBM Corp. He was responsible for creating IBM's Cloud platform and aligning IBM's direction for Cloud and Mobility. He holds an MA and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Rochester and and MBA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.