Great Innovation Books

[Business Week]

Best Innovation and Design Books for 2006
We looked past obvious titles to compile a list of books that will inform the thinking about innovation beyond this year

by Bruce Nussbaum

Community and creativity dominated the innovation space—and the authors who write about it—this year. The buzz? Mass collaboration, social networking, co-creation, and, of course, consumer experience. As we browsed the 2006 aisle looking for books to include in our best-of list, we left some of the more predictable titles on the shelf—books like The World Is Flat and The Long Tail, which have already become clichés. Instead, our team—Jessie Scanlon, Helen Walters, Reena Jana, Jessi Hempel, Aili McConnon, and I—chose what we see as the most significant books to hit the stores this year, the books that will continue to shape our thinking into '07.

Let's start with the not-so-obvious theme of social network analysis and network cartography that could really catch fire this coming year. The next big step in open-source innovation and social networking is plotting out just how people do communicate and work with each other, and displaying those data in insightful ways. Edward Tufte's Beautiful Evidence is a masterpiece from a pioneer in the field of data visualization. His book is brilliant. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams' Wikinomics is right in that space as well.

Innovation may be the new black as chief executives everywhere get their PR writers to script them speeches that embrace it. But beyond the blah-blah, building effective innovation procedures and processes remains the single most important challenge for top managers. Five books provide serious, insightful advice: Payback by James Andrew and Harold Sirkin, Juicing the Orange by Pat Fallon and Fred Senn, Mavericks at Work by William Taylor and Polly LaBarre, Zag by Marty Neumeier, and Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape by Berkeley professor Henry Chesbrough.

INTERACTING WITH IT ALL
We're all obsessing over Second Life and virtual communities, but it's worth remembering the universal power of the town square, the arena, and the other very real places where we come together. The book to read about why we love to experience things together and publicly is David Rockwell and Bruce Mau's Spectacle. It's a coffee-table-size exposition of NASCAR, Burning Man, Hindu religious rites in the Ganges, and other glorious spectacles that people experience together.

Some books just can't be categorized, like Bill Moggridge's Designing Interactions. A pioneer of interaction design, Moggridge had a hand in designing one of the world's first laptops, the GRID, and co-founded the successful design consultancy Ideo. Now he has amassed interviews with just about everyone who counts in a dazzling tour of the past 20 years (all on the CD sold with the book). His great lesson—it's not about the UI (user interface), it's about the people who use it.

Which brings us back to, well, us—the buyers, users, readers, citizens, and inhabitants of our planet. Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century, edited by Alex Steffen, gives us the tools to get to a green economy and society. Green tech and green growth will be very '07.