Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want

Everybody talks about "innovation" these days, but here's a practical guide to getting it right. Carlson writes in an engaging manner, with real-world examples. It all just seems to make sense when you read it. Any company or organization out there that wants long-term success would do well to follow the five disciplines described in this book.

It has been often suggested that innovation comes from an isolated Aha! Carlson and Wilmot strongly contend that successful innovations come from a disciplined approach that creates value through new products, processes, services, or even marketing campaigns. One of their messages is to work on ideas that are profitable not just interesting. They suggest quantifying value in order to identify important innovation opportunities. They teach the reader how to create well tuned value propositions, and even those 10-minute elevator pitches. The authors provide examples their Need, Approach, Benefits per costs, Competition thinking process. This is not one of those magical matrices, it is a realistic approach that requires understanding customer and market needs, identifying costs and benefits, as well as, the value to investors and management. I thought this was a great book even before Business Week (18 Dec 2007 p.156) identified it as one of the top 2006 Business Books. "Innovation: The five disciplines for creating what customers want" is an easy to read, useful volume that helps readers to focus on the value of their idea or innovation as compared to alternatives. I would like to use this book in a course to help students to examine their business ideas

Rarely does a business book strike such a delightful balance between content and readability. Carlson and Willmott collaborate to share theory, formula, and proof in "Innovation." While the case studies can at times appear boastful, they provide hard evidence. The concept of a "Value Proposition" is elegantly portrayed...a must read for anybody who has something to sell (in other words, everybody). This book's a jewel.

This practical and accessible book eloquently argues that innovation is much more predictable and achievable when the right process is used to guide those involved in the innovative effort. The authors leave no doubt as to what the process is, or who is involved. It's the 5 Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want. And these disciplines involve everyone in the firm--not just a few guiding superstars. Rather then a long list of new and complex concepts, the 5 Disciplines will probably appear as common sense to most readers. The authors forcefully argue that innovation is what enables the world's inhabitants to choose between living in scarcity or abundance, and that the best guide to innovation in the post-industrial "Exponential Economy" is to focus on Customer Value Creation (CVC). This is a book for practitioners, not theorists, although the latter will find the models offered provide fertile ground for validation and refinement. For the practitioner, the 5 Disciplines unfold in short, easy-to comprehend chapters that invite immediate application to one's current place of employment. Sprinkled liberally in the 300+ pages between the covers are suggestions for immediate application of a principle just presented and short stories that illustrate the authors' practical experience in putting their proposals into action. While SRI is most likely a place very unlike any firm at which you've ever worked, the book's slight bias towards fundamental research and innovation (vs. incremental product enhancement) entices the reader to always think first about what's most important. To, as the authors suggest in the early pages, put your innovative energy into new pain killers, not vitamins. At the end of the day, you want the results of your innovation to alleviate real pain, to not be just a generic undifferentiated "nice-to-have". This book is an excellent guide to anyone, or organization, ready to sign up to this goal.

Are you working on a project you'd like to have succeed? If so, this book is essential reading. It provides a set of tools and best practices that will greatly improve your likelihood of success. It is presented in a way that is accessible to people in any field. The book is about giving people the skills for charting a path to making a positive difference in our world. Many books on innovation talk about the people involved and the results of innovation. But this book's rare perspective is on the "how" of innovation - the Five Disciplines of INNOVATION. INNOVATION explains the tools and processes that CEO co-author Carlson honed and used to turn around SRI International, one of the largest independent research corporations in the U.S. At the time he became CEO, the company had been in a long, slow slide. But only a few years later, the company had turned around with double digit growth, when the economy was only in single digit growth. This book gives a "can-do" perspective on innovation through successful innovation practices, from different fields and companies such as Apple and Toyota. It gives valuable insights into paradigm-changing innovations of the past and of the emerging opportunities in what the authors describe as today's "exponential economy." From this solid grounding, the book also gives recommendations for how innovation best practices can be embraced by the U.S. government to help keep the U.S. in a leadership position.