Innovation X: Why a Company's Toughest Problems Are Its Greatest Advantage

Innovation is one of todays hottest business topic and Fortune 500 companies are ramping up innovation efforts after years of focusing on bottom line efficiencies. So why do so many still struggle with realizing the opportunities they expected to gain from these innovations? Adam Richardson offers fresh approaches to innovation that tackle head on a new class of business problems and innovation challenges that come from a confluence of competition appearing from unexpected quarters, stagnation in understanding customers and new growth opportunities, and customers becoming more interested in experiences than products. These problems are a double-edged sword: mercilessly risky and complex but at the same time presenting huge opportunities for growth and sustained competitive advantage. Conventional wisdom in the past ten years has been to crank up the innovation engine to solve complex competitive challenges, but in fact this can make the situation worse, not better. As Director of Product Strategy at frog design, inc., one of the worlds leading design consultancies, Richardson collaborates with companies of all different sizes and types in many different industries to help them envision and realize successful new business ventures, products, software and websites, fundamentally about what should they make in order to create growth and differentiation in increasingly competitive markets. There are four very specific approaches to innovation that can lead to success: Immersion, Convergence, Emergence, and Divergence. Innovation X reveals the tools and frameworks used by frog design to tackle today's innovation challenges, drawing on frogs 40-year history of unconventional thinking and process. The book will be liberally sprinkled with case studies a broad range of industries, as well as examples from frogs own client work spanning 40 years. Though frog has its roots in design, this is not a design book. Instead it is written from a point of view that is emerging from combining design thinking (which emphasizes deep customer understanding, creativity, qualitative data, and intuitive leaps) and business strategy (emphasizing clear metrics, quantitative data, organizational fit, competitive awareness, and risk mitigation). Pure inventive creativity or analytic horsepower are not enough by themselves to crack the challenges, they must be combined. Putting them together in a way that is productive is difficult to do, and it is a task frog has been focusing on for several years as we work with our clients on a wide variety of projects. Much of what the book will touch on is drawn directly from in-the-trenches work with clients of all sizes and types, with stakeholders from staff level to CEO.