Innovation Capital: How to Compete and Win-Like the World’s Most Innovative Leaders Hardcover – June 4, 2019, reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of Innovation Capital: How to Compete-and Win-Like the World’s Most Innovative Leaders Hardcover – June 4, 2019. Available from Amazon here. By Jeff Dyer, Nathan Furr and Curtis Lefrandt. 

Learn from the Best

Great leaders of innovation know that creativity is not enough. They succeed not only on the basis of their ideas, but because they have the vision, reputation, and networks to win the backing needed to commercialize them. It turns out that this quality–called “innovation capital”–is measurably more important for innovation than just being creative.

The authors have spent decades studying how people get great ideas (the subject of The Innovator’s DNA) and how people test and develop those ideas (explored in The Innovator’s Method).

Now they share what they’ve learned from a multipronged research program designed to determine how people compete for, and obtain, resources to launch new ideas:

How you can build a personal reputation for innovation
What techniques you can use to amplify your innovation capital
How you can garner attention for your ideas and projects and persuade audiences to support them
What it means to provide visionary leadership and how you can achieve it

Featuring interviews with the superstars of innovation–individuals like Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Elon Musk (Tesla), Marc Benioff (Salesforce), Indra Nooyi (PepsiCo), and Shantanu Narayen (Adobe)–this book will help you position yourself and your ideas to compete for attention and resources so that you can launch innovations with impact.

Innovation Capital: How to Compete and Win, reviewed

Not all business ideas and entrepreneurs are treated equally. While the name Tesla has come back into vogue, the authors of this book very clearly demonstrate the contrasting fortunes of Nikolai Tesla and Thomas Eddison. One died penniless, the other success, valued by his peers, and wealthy too. Despite the fact that the former invented something superior, and ultimately, arguably, more effective.

This book covers interesting ground by exploring the softer skills aspects of how to be a successful innovator and entrepreneur. This is a topic close to our own hearts as so many smart inventors and innovators are poor are communicating why their project is awesome, and how it is better and different to potential rivals. We enjoyed their discussion of the importance of communicating their message, and the various platforms that they should be using including blogs, Linkedin, Twitter and other avenues to reach as many people as possible.

The authors offer a wide range of streetwise insights into how to get your message across, and why this is important, because VCs and investors are looking for the whole package in terms of founders and their abilities to communicate. The case studies, including a detailed deep dive into Amazon and their willingness to keep investing in many many projects, even though some may never yield a return any time soon.

We liked their approach of asking anyone looking to pitch a new potential idea to first write a notional / fictional pressrelease for it – basically the elevator pitch in different words. Then to follow this with a six page FAQ (frequently answered questions) document too, to show that they have thought through what the response might be. And, to then finally follow this with a customer experience mock up to walk you through the experience too.

This level of detail helps to provide useful, actionable ideas for those reading the book, looking to develop their own ideas. It is an interesting book, well worth reading if you are planning to get your hands dirty and actually take your ideas from beyond the sketch pad into reality.

More cutting edge business books reviewed here.

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