Getting to Innovation: How Asking the Right Questions Generates the Great Ideas Your Company Needs

Getting to Innovation is the ideal guide book for any manager embarking on an innovation process in her company. It explains fundamental concepts and provides a step-by-step process for, as the title puts it, "getting to innovation". Andy (as author Arthur VanGundy prefers to be called), spends the first half of the book explaining what an innovation challenge is, how to frame an innovation challenge and how to analyze your own organization's innovation needs and turn them into challenges. This is critical. All too many corporate innovation programs start with suggestion schemes designed to capture all kinds of ideas. Too many brainstorming events begin with poorly thought out problems. As a result, many business innovation programs generate lots of ideas - but the ideas are largely irrelevant to current business needs. This not only wastes money and resources, but is very demotivating to employees. Effective innovation challenges, on the other hand, are designed to generate ideas that solve your business problems. Andy explains in detail how to frame them, what to include and what to avoid. Andy then goes one step further, providing a framework for organizations to question strategic issues, determine weaknesses and frame challenges designed to overcome those weaknesses. This is an approach that Andy has honed over many years of creativity and innovation consulting. And it works. The second half of the book looks at idea generation methods, idea management and idea evaluation approaches. Although less focused than the first half of the book, the second part provides a wealth of tools, techniques and advice to business managers. Seasoned innovation consultants who have read it all may feel that Getting to Innovation covers a lot of obvious ground - although even they will doubtless learn from this gem of a book. But Getting to Innovation is not written for them. It is written for the many managers today who know they need to launch innovation initiatives in their firms - but don't know where to start. If that describes you - order this book today! -- Disclaimer: I should point out that Andy VanGundy is a friend with whom I've exchanged many an e-mail on the theory and practice of innovation. I've learned from him during our correspondence and I have learned from this book.

The whole issue of "framing", as the author calls it, is a really important one for creatives like myself (communication and graphic design). How often do we end up working on projects where we're supposed to develop ideas that are half-baked, because the client just doesn't have enough clarity on the issue or opportunity being addressed and understanding of how it relates to the environment in which they are operating? As I mature in my profession I spend more and more time gently guiding clients toward this pre-innovation work; I simply won't accept jobs where this work hasn't been done because without it, no matter how well I do my job, the result will not be effective. Creativity and innovation don't happen in a vaccuum. There are always other players and other issues impinging on the work we do. It's really important to get, and to analyze, that information up front. Vangundy has focussed in on THE key issue.

VanGundy has written an extremely useful book. I've spent the past 25 years working as a strategic and innovation consultant for large corporations around the world. One of the most common traps my clients fall into is the "great answer -- wrong question" syndrome. Unless the problem is framed accurately and in a way that invites the possibility of a targeted solution, it doesn't matter how creative or innovative an individual or organization is. You can't generate useful solutions to problems you don't really understand. It's kind of like a baseball batter having a great swing, but not a great eye. The best swing in the world won't help you, unless you can connect your bat with the ball. VanGundy's book offers an easy and effective approach to finding and framing problems in a way that opens them up to the possibility of solution. I've read several of VanGundy's earlier books, and each one has provided me with gems that I use almost daily in my business. Getting to Innovation will definitely join that list. My only quibble with the book is that its title may be slightly misleading: it's is less about "getting to innovation" than it is about getting to understand the problem. In that sense it's more of a springboard to innovation. This is a very practical, worthwhile book. Highly recommended if you've even encountered the "great answer -- wrong question syndrome" -- and who hasn't?