I am especially appreciative of various series of anthologies of HBR articles that are published by Harvard Business Review. These include HBR Essentials, HBR on, and HBR 10 Must Reads. If all of the articles each contains were purchased as reprints separately, the total cost would be $60-75. And having all of them in a single volume is indeed a substantial value-added benefit.
Volumes in a new series are being released and the one that caught my eye is HBR on Inspiring & Executing Innovation. Priced at only $22.00, those who read its contents will learn how to
• Decide which ideas are worth pursuing.
• Adapt offerings from the developing world to wealthy markets.
• Plan all-new ventures by testing and tweaking.
• Tailor your efforts to meet customers’ most pressing needs.
• Make inexpensive products on a vast scale.
• Measure and improve innovation performance.
• Avoid classic pitfalls such as stifling innovation with rigid processes.
Harvard Business Review on Inspiring & Executing Innovation includes:
Innovation’s Holy Grail by C.K. Prahalad and R.A. Mashelkar
As you innovate for today’s customers, focus on affordability and sustainability. Indian companies lead the way with a $2,000 car, a penny’s worth of phone time, and other disruptive offerings.
Stop the Innovation Wars by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble
Partner your innovative upstarts with protectors of your core business. Together, they’ll drum up great ideas that work.
How GE Is Disrupting Itself by Jeffrey R. Immelt, Vijay Govindarajan, and Chris Trimble
To stay in the global innovation game, it’s not enough to create products for a rich home market and adapt them abroad. You also need to do the reverse: innovate for developing markets and tailor the offerings for wealthy ones, as GE did with portable ultrasounds.
The Customer-Centered Innovation Map by Lance A. Bettencourt and Anthony W. Ulwick
Break down the jobs customers need to get done into discrete steps — and create products and services that make those jobs easier, faster, or unnecessary.
The Innovation Value Chain by Morten T. Hansen and Julian Birkinshaw
Need to improve your company’s innovation processes, but not sure where to start? This framework will help you find and fix the weak links.
Is It Real? Can We Win? Is It Worth Doing? by George S. Day
Innovate too cautiously, and you risk strangling growth. Here’s how to screen big, risky projects for profitability and competitive advantage.
Innovation: The Classic Traps by Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Most companies keep repeating the same innovation mistakes, like setting unrealistic performance targets and overlooking small but profitable ideas. Avoid these errors — and turn ideas into market successes.
Discovery-Driven Planning by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. MacMillan
Launching a new venture? Use this process to uncover, test, and revise your guiding assumptions so you can prevent failure — or at least fail cheaply and learn from the experiment.
The Discipline of Innovation by Peter F. Drucker
Want to lead your company to brilliant ideas that pay off in the marketplace? Inspiration alone won’t get you there. It also takes careful analysis of opportunities in key areas, such as new technical knowledge and industry changes.
Innovation Killers: How Financial Tools Destroy Your Capacity to Do New Things by Clayton M. Christensen, Stephen P. Kaufman, and Willy C. Shih
Misguided financial analysis may be stifling your company’s innovation efforts. Here’s how to avoid making bad calls about investments’ value and potential for success.
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Having read all these articles when they first appeared in HBR, I can attest to their quality. Yes, a few were published a while ago but, if anything, their insights and core concepts are, if anything, of even greater relevance — and value — now than they were then.
You will be pleased to know that two other volumes in the series are also available: HBR on Collaborating Effectively and HBR on Thriving in Emerging Markets. Please click here to check them out.