Innovation By Design

How Any Organization Can Leverage Design Thinking to Produce Change, Drive New Ideas, and Deliver Meaningful Solutions

By: Thomas Lockwood, Edgar Papke

Narrated by: Chris Henry Coffey

Why are some organizations more innovative than others? How can we tap in to, empower, and leverage the natural innovation within our organizations that is so vital to our future success? Now more than ever, companies and institutions of all types and sizes are determined to create more innovative organizations.

In study after study, leaders say that fostering innovation and the need for transformational change are among their top priorities. But they also report struggling with how to engage their cultures to implement the changes necessary to maximize their innovative targets.

In Innovation by Design, authors Thomas Lockwood and Edgar Papke share the results of their study of some of the world's most innovative organizations, including:

• The 10 ways leaders can create and develop effective cultures of innovation.
• How to use design thinking as a powerful method to drive employee creativity and innovation.
• How to leverage the natural influence of the collective imagination to produce the "pull effect" of creativity and risk taking.
• How leaders can take the "Fifth Step of Design" and create their ideal culture.

Innovation by Design offers a powerful set of insights and practical solutions to the most important challenge for today's businesses - the need for relevant innovation.

©2018 Thomas Lockwood and Edgar Papke (P)2018 Recorded Books

Not much content

Author says Design about 500 times but does not go into much detail about what that means or how to apply it

Meaningful content, that gets hidden in the fluff

Overall, this is a good book detailing the growing interest in design thinking. The companies interviewed are impressive and the stories have real value. I just found that the book could have been considerably more concise. Whole passages exist to boost and elevate the authors rather than further their premise. I understand the need to establish credibility at the start of the book, but when it continues straight through the final chapter I question the relevance.

Would I recommend this book? Hard to say actually. A quick read of a few articles on design thinking will give you as much or more useable pieces to go on. If you're looking for validation that design thinking will stick around then yes, this book is for you.

Nothing new here

I struggled to slog through this. Maybe I am overloaded and jaded with "design" jargon from beret wearing 25 year old experts but all I heard was aa lot of jargon and business stories, many of which were actually quite old and not new at all. I think we used to call this customer driven stuff "strategic marketing". I seem to recall "Sesame Street" was very big on having focus groups with their watchers (kids) waaaay back when. For the first time in my life I think I'm going to recommend a book by a full blown academic over a business book. "The Design of Business" by Roger Martin is a significantly more practical way of thinking about design, which, by the way, was written in 2009. I fear this topic is saturated, once you've read through Reis,, Christensen, and Taleb there's really very little else left to talk about. I also challenge the causality of design thinking. It is touted as the thing behind great business successes, however could it not be possible that the success period and the implementation of design thinking are coincidental, or, more likely, that something else that design thinking catalysed was the cause of the success. Like maybe the removal of hierarchy (not something which is purely the claim of design thinking - read Maverick by Ricardo Semler for example). Of maybe the impact on morale of being "involved" for once in their lives (read anything on change management - Lewin, Kotter, whoever). Maybe it's really just about having everyone on the same field, with the right skills, and wanting to play for the same team?