The Innovation Reading Circle aims to help develop theory around innovation through rich, high-level and well-informed public discussion around key and related texts and discourses... [Read on in Objectives]

12: Innovation in the real world

The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun (O'Reilly, 2007) [Order from Amazon.co.uk] [Suggested by Christina Li]

Scott Berkun is an author, public speaker and consultant. He was a manager at Microsoft (1994–2003), on projects including Internet Explorer, Windows and MSN become becoming independent. He is author of The art of project management (O’Reilly, 2005), which will be updated and re-published as Making things happen, and teaches a graduate course in creative thinking at the University of Washington in Washington state.

The Myths of Innovation reviews celebrated historic and culturally accepted stories of innovation to demystify and explain how innovation doesn’t work – and how it does. Berkun presents insights around innovation epiphanies; the nature and complementarity of ideas; artifacts as the cultural embodiment of innovation; our presentation of innovation history, and perception of it as perfect; the idea of a method of innovation, and that managers know how to do it; the origins of and motivations behind innovations; practical and social barriers to innovation; the lone inventor and simultaneous invention; executing ideas; why the best ideas rarely succeed; and the unexpectedness, and unexpected effects, of many innovations. The Myths of Innovation short volume: engagingly written and well illustrated, and includes annotated and ranked bibliographies.

Related titles

Innovation and Entrepreneurship Peter F. Drucker (Butterworth-Heinemann Ltd, 2007) [First edition 1985]

The Oxford Handbook of Innovation Jan Fagerberg (Editor), David C. Mowery (Editor), Richard R. Nelson (Editor) (Oxford University Press, 2006)

Why Most things Fail Paul Omerod (Wiley, 2007) [Suggested by Rishi Dastidar: I think will provide an interesting view on the failure of innovations as well as other social systems]

Designing Interactions Bill Moggridge (The MIT Press, 2007)

Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design Bill Buxton (Morgan Kaufmann, 2007)