Preface

The aim of this book is to provide you with the smallest number of things you need to know to start building an innovation management capability that creates value in your organisation.

This is somewhat challenging, because innovation management is a rela­tive­ly new discipline. It doesn’t have the history of, say, marketing or accounting. As a result, there isn’t really a body of practical experience which permits practitioners to say “this is the right way!”. Instead, innovators are often forced to make it up as they go along.

Sometimes, what they’ve tried has worked, but more often than not, it hasn’t. The result is innovation is seen as a discipline which lacks a little something in the way of credibility.

Some of us, though, have been working hard to create reliable and repeat­able processes that work for large organisations. This has taken us on a journey that’s led to an unmistakable conclu­sion: you must treat innovation as a business process, and it needs to earn its place amongst other mission critical processes – like marketing and accounting – in organisations.

The Little Innovation Book is a collection of essays based on my writing on innovation over the last four years. It encapsulates much of the learn­ing I’ve had driving innovation in various large organisations such as Microsoft and Lloyds Banking Group, and attempts to distil this into a set of topics that anyone consider­ing an innovation effort will find useful.

I hope you’ll enjoy The Little Innovation Book, and that you find it useful in your innova­tion efforts. I certainly enjoyed the creative processes involved in writing it.