Entrepreneurship

Take a Design-led Approach to Innovation Innovation drives growth in organisations and entire economies. Yet innovation is hard, risky and rarely successful. Most innovations and startups fail because of a lack of focus on the front end of the innovation process where customer needs are researched, insights are distilled, solutions are ideated, prototyped and tested and business models are shaped. But innovation doesn't have to be this way. In Innovator's Playbook, author and leading Design Thinking expert Nathan Baird shares his 20 years of hands-on experience, tools and methods for developing a winning customer-centric approach to innovation. This book will teach you how to apply the design thinking method to innovation and help you to innovate better with five practical and proven stages: 1. Build the right team for innovation. 2. Better understand your customer through empathy. 3. Distill and refine customer-centric needs and insights. 4. Unleash your team's creativity to create fresh new ideas to address customer needs. 5. Experiment and validate desirable, feasible and viable solutions. Innovator's Playbook helps entrepreneurs, corporate teams, startups and leaders across all levels to use design-led methodologies for start-to-finish innovation success.

In 2009 Jim McKelvey lost a sale because he couldn't accept American Express cards. Frustrated by the high costs and difficulty of accepting card payments, McKelvey joined his friend Jack Dorsey (the co-founder of Twitter) to launch Square, a startup that would enable small merchants to accept card payments on their mobiles. But just as Square was taking off, Amazon launched a similar product - but retreated within a year. How did Square beat the most dangerous company on the planet? Was it just luck? McKelvey eventually found the key: a strategy he calls the Innovation Stack.

Big data entrepreneur Allen Gannett overturns the mythology around creative genius, and reveals the science and secrets behind achieving breakout commercial success in any field.   We have been spoon-fed the notion that creativity is the province of genius -- of those favored, brilliant few whose moments of insight arrive in unpredictable flashes of divine inspiration.  And if we are not a genius, we might as well pack it in and give up. Either we have that gift, or we don't.  But Allen shows that simply isn't true.  Recent research has shown that there is a predictable science behind achieving commercial success in any creative endeavor, from writing a popular novel to starting up a successful company to creating an effective marketing campaign.    As the world's most creative people have discovered, we are enticed by the novel and the familiar. By understanding the mechanics of what Gannett calls "the creative curve" - the point of optimal tension between the novel and the familiar - everyone can better engineer mainstream success.    In a thoroughly entertaining book that describes the stories and insights of everyone from the Broadway team behind Dear Evan Hansen, to the founder of Reddit, from the Chief Content Officer of Netflix to Michelin star chefs, Gannett reveals the four laws of creative success and identifies the common patterns behind their achievement.