Content tagged with "innovation"

The 20% Doctrine: How Tinkering, Goofing Off, and Breaking the Rules at Work Drive Success in Business
Book Review
November 13, 2014
192

A collection of stories about 20% and “skunkworks” projects and what makes them tick. The stories were interesting – the first ones were slanted toward tech, and the later stories branched out – but I was having trouble drawing any common principles out of it. This was remedied somewhat in the…

Diffusion of Innovations
Book Review
July 17, 2017
70

Classic book about how new ideas spread. I like how Rogers has a set of “generalizations” about his ideas. These are things that might not be proven by statistics but feel generally correct. A lot of network theory, but a very good read. Just the right mixture of density and readability.

The Engines of Our Ingenuity: An Engineer Looks at Technology and Culture
Deane’s Library
Book Review
June 17, 2024
424

I didn’t quite know what to do with this book. I think it was recommended to me by someone. It’s a collection of essays about invention, innovation, and engineering. I read a half-dozen of them before bailing out. It was weird – I couldn’t figure out any thematic consistency to them. Then I realized…

The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business
Deane’s Library
Book Review
April 18, 2021
364

This book is a legendary examination of how companies handle “innovation,” by which the author means new aspects of their business that come out of nowhere and eventually come to dominate their markets. The problem: you can’t just give customers what they ask for. Because lots of customers actually…

Inventology: How We Dream Up Things That Change the World
Deane’s Library
Book Review
January 13, 2017
22
Leading Change
Deane’s Library
Book Review
December 26, 2023
16
The Road Ahead
Deane’s Library
Book Review
December 4, 2020
233

This book was written 25 years ago, in 1995, right on the cusp of the Internet as we know it today. Bill Gates was the CEO of Microsoft at the time, and this book was really meant to be an look at the exciting things that we coming in the future. It’s chapter after chapter about how the “information…

A Sense of Urgency
Deane’s Library
Book
9