Using Thematic Thinking to Achieve Business Success, Growth, and Innovation: Finding Opportunities Where Others Don't Look

Leverage hidden similarities and connections to succeed in new markets and avert emerging business risks! Firmly rooted in the latest cognitive science, Thematic Thinking helps you recognize your great opportunities and grave threats in distant but related industries and markets. If you're an executive, entrepreneur, or strategist, it will help you illuminate blind spots on your strategic maps and innovation processes, by radically redefining what you see as similar to your core business.

Using Thematic Thinking to Achieve Business Success, Growth, and Innovation explains why this approach to innovation works so well, and how to successfully apply it in your business. Using realistic business cases, the authors show: 

• How Thematic Thinking responds to today's radically shifting business environment, and the collapse of traditional market boundaries
• Why traditional approaches to innovation can often be counterproductive, and how to go beyond them
• How to systematically uncover deep similarities where most managers only see differences
• How to understand these similarities as immense new business opportunities – and uncover emerging risks you wouldn't otherwise notice until too late
• How to explore and combine themes, identify similarities, create and evaluate thematic ideas, organize for Thematic Thinking, and overcome obstacles to success

Which Google manager would have imagined people substituting Facebook for Gmail? Which Nike manager recognizes the huge potential competitive threat now presented by Apple? With Thematic Thinking, linkages like this become clear – and innovative, once-hidden strategic options are revealed!

Julia K. Froehlich conducts research at the Institute for Organization and Human Resource Management at the University of Bern (Bern, Switzerland). She worked at the Institute for Leadership and Organization at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Munich, Germany) and the chair for Leadership and Human Resource Management at the WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management (Koblenz, Germany), and was a visiting researcher at the University of Lugano (Switzerland). She is psychologist by training and devoted her doctoral thesis in management to thematic thinking. Her research focuses on managerial and organizational cognition in the fields of innovation and strategy. Her special interest lies in the idea itself; she is always on the lookout for great new ideas wherever she goes.

Michael Gibbert is professor of marketing at the University of Lugano (Switzerland). He is interested in innovation management and how creative ideas emerge and are turned into successful marketplace strategies. Unless he is in a bad mood, he uses Thematic Thinking every day. His academic work has been published in a variety of journals, including Journal of Product Innovation Management, R&D Management , Industrial Marketing Management , Research Policy , Strategic Management Journal , Organizational Research Methods , and others.

Martin Hoegl is professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Munich, Germany), where he heads the Institute for Leadership and Organization. Before joining LMU Munich, he served on the faculties of Washington State University (USA), Bocconi University (Milan, Italy), and WHU (Vallendar, Germany). His main research interests include leadership, collaboration, and innovation in organizations. Martin Hoegl held visiting professorships at the Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern University, USA) and at the National Sun Yat-Sen University (Taiwan), and has given guest lectures at various international universities. He has been published in the Academy of Management Journal , Journal of International Business Studies , Journal of Management , Journal of Product Innovation Management , MIT Sloan Management Review , Organization Science , and other journals.