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“Permanent Innovation: The Essential Guide to the Strategies, Principles and Practices of Successful Innovators”, is a new book that explores the essential strategies, principles, and practices of permanent innovation to help your company to become a permanent innovator, and perhaps even a leader.
The book is available for free download under a “Creative Commons” license.
“It’s only fitting that a book on innovation should be distributed in an innovative way,” Morris
commented, “so I decided to make it available to everyone for free. Everyone knows that innovation is one of the most important factors in the success of any organization, and people from dozens of countries all over the world have already downloaded it.”
According to the publisher while most innovation books focus on only one topic, Permanent Innovation looks at the entire scope of innovation. It covers the strategies, principles, and methods that have made companies like Toyota, Starbucks, and Wal-Mart so successful. It also includes dozens of specific ideas that can help people to make their own organizations more innovative.
The Author defines Innovation as the process of creating new ideas and turning them into new business value. Permanent Innovation is the process of doing it continuously, as a matter of strategy, method, and habit. It happens in organizations that embrace innovation as a core value, practice innovation as a core methodology, and produce innovation as a consistent output. Permanent Innovation is thus a strategic and human process much more than a technological one, and we achieve excellence at it through thoughtful repetition of the right methods.
The Ten Principles of Permanent Innovation
The author admits that Innovation is a vast topic, one with many diverging highways, side streets, and dead ends. Consequently, there are many different ways to approach the complexity that you confront when you decide to make innovation a priority. The book provides the ten principles of Permanent Innovation that are intended to be a map for the reader, for they are vitally important to a successful journey. These principles which are presented through the book are:
- Innovation is essential to survival, and all innovation is strategic.
- There are four types of innovation: incremental, breakthrough products & technologies, new business models, and new ventures.
- The longer you wait to begin innovating, the worse things will get.
- Innovation is a social art; it happens when people interact with one another.
- Innovation without methodology is just luck.
- All four strategic innovation viewpoints are critical to success.
- Great innovations begin with great ideas; to find them, identify unknown and unmet needs.
- Ready, Aim, Aim, Aim, Fire.
- Prototype rapidly to accelerate learning.
- There is no innovation without leadership.
About the author
Langdon Morris is a partner of InnovationLabs and an affiliate of WDHB Consulting Group. His work focuses on innovation, strategy, and collaboration methodologies to solve complex problems with very high levels of creativity and innovation.
To help those who want to incorporate the ideas they find in Permanent Innovation as part of their own work, Morris opted for a “Creative Commons” copyright, which enables others to use Morris’ work as part of their own creative process. “Innovation is about creativity,” Morris explains, “and enabling other people to use the book means that we can co-create new ideas to help improve innovation practices around the world.”