How to build innovation skills, learn and get inspired to develop as a corporate innovator?
This post is our 2021 edition of the Corporate Innovators’ reading list, with over 20 new titles covering different aspects of innovation, including Intrapreneurship, Strategic Innovation, Business Model Innovation, Facilitation and Collaboration, Design Thinking, Innovation Mindset, with some new discoveries and old classics.
We listed the original websites of the authors wherever possible, so you can get to know the people behind the titles and find the local or international bookseller of your choice. Book descriptions include excerpts written by the publisher.
If you have other favourite books that we missed, please let us know for our next edition of the reading list!
More resources, games as well as some free tools for corporate innovators, including an infographic on 12 Transformative Questions for Corporate Innovators, check out our shop page.
Recently Published
Humanocracy
In a world of unrelenting change and unprecedented challenges, we need organizations that give everyone the opportunity to learn and innovate. Read more…
Strategic Innovation
Think Again
Intelligence is usually seen as the ability to think and learn, but in a rapidly changing world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn. Read more…
Innovation Mindset
The Invincible Company
From the authors of Business Model Generation, comes the book that describes how “invincible companies” not only know how to design superior business models but they constantly reinvent themselves. Read more…
Business Model Innovation
Intrapreneurship
The Startup Way
This sequel to the Lean Startup, describes how modern companies use entrepreneurial management to transform culture & drive long-term growth. Read more…
The Startup Owner’s Manual
The Startup Owner’s Manual guides you, step-by-step, as you put the Customer Development process to work. This method was created by renowned Silicon Valley startup expert Steve Blank, acknowledged catalyst of the “Lean Startup” movement. Read more…
Pirates in the Navy
This book is written for passionate innovators working in large companies who want to create an innovation ecosystem and bring it to life, change the culture within their company, influence leaders and create a lasting change. Read more…
Strategic Innovation
Brave New Work
Learn how to reinvent the way you work, not through top-down mandates, but through a groundswell of autonomy, trust, and transparency. Read more…
Measure What Matters
Learn how a simple goal setting technique called OKRs—objectives and key results— propelled Google, The Gates Foundation, and Bono to exceed all expectations. Read more…
Reinventing Organizations
Reinventing organizations has inspired thousands of organizations throughout the world to take a radical leap and adopt a whole different set of management principles and practices. Read more…
Facilitating Innovation & Collaboration
Visual Collaboration
Organizations often struggle to find engaging and effective ways to manage complexity. When people draw together, they learn together. Read more…
The Sprint Book
Invented at Google by Jake Knapp, perfected with more than 150 startups at GV, the big idea with the Design Sprint is to build and test a prototype in just five days. Read more…
The World Cafe Book: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations that Matter
In the first comprehensive book on the World Café, co-founders Juanita Brown and David Isaacs introduce readers to this simple yet powerful conversational process for thinking together, evoking collective intelligence, and creating actionable results. Read more…
Innovation Mindset
The Infinite Game
The leaders who embrace an infinite mindset, build stronger, more innovative, more inspiring organizations. Their people trust each other and their leaders. Read more…
Growth Mindset
People with a fixed mindset—those who believe that abilities are fixed—are less likely to flourish than those with a growth mindset—those who believe that abilities can be developed. Read more…
The Fearless Organization
With many convincing practical examples and scientific substantiation, this book shows that a company can only make real progress when employees feel free to discuss their plans and ideas and dare to express their concerns openly. Read more…
Business Model Innovation
Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs
The innovation framework describes ten distinct types of innovation that need to be orchestrated with care to make game-changing innovations. Read more…
Blue Ocean Shift
Drawing on more than a decade of new research, Blue Ocean Shift is a follow-up to Blue Ocean Strategy, and a definitive guide to help you move beyond competing, inspire your people’s confidence, and seize new growth. Read more…
Business Model Generation
This classic book built around the Business Model Canvas, provides practical tools to understand, design and implement a new business model or renovate an old one. Read more…
Innovate like a Design Thinker
The Ten Faces of Innovation
Filled with engaging stories of how companies such as Kraft, Samsung, and Procter & Gamble have incorporated IDEO’s thinking to transform the customer experience, The Ten Faces of Innovation is an extraordinary guide to nurturing and sustaining a culture of continuous innovation and renewal. Read more…
Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation
Tim Brown reintroduces design thinking, the collaborative process by which the designer’s sensibilities and methods are employed to match people’s needs with what is technically feasible and a viable business strategy. Read more…
The Design Thinking Playbook
The Design Thinking Playbook is an actionable guide to the future of business. By stepping back and questioning the current mindset, the faults of the status quo stand out in stark relief-and this guide gives you the tools and frameworks you need to kick off a digital transformation. Read more…
Old Classics, Biographies and Miscellaneous discoveries on Innovation
Let My People Go Surfing
From his youth as the son of a French Canadian blacksmith to the thrilling, ambitious climbing expeditions that inspired his innovative designs for the sport’s equipment, Let My People Go Surfing is the story of a man who brought doing good and having grand adventures into the heart of his business life-a book that will deeply affect entrepreneurs and outdoor enthusiasts alike. Read more…
Maverick
Semler turned his family’s business, the aging Semco corporation of Brazil, into the most revolutionary business success story of our time. By eliminating unneeded layers of management and allowing employees unprecedented democracy in the workplace, he created a company that challenged the old ways and blazed a path to success in an uncertain economy. Read more…
The Necessary Revolution
Imagine a world in which the excess energy from one business would be used to heat another. Where buildings need less and less energy around the world, and where “regenerative” commercial buildings – ones that create more energy than they use – are being designed. Read more…
The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
In this revolutionary bestseller, Clayton Christensen demonstrates how successful, outstanding companies can do everything “right” and yet still lose their market leadership – or even fail – as new, unexpected competitors rise and take over the market. Read more…
The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
In The Innovator’s Solution, Clayton Christensen and coauthor Michael E. Raynor build on Christensen’s groundbreaking disruptive innovation research to help all companies understand how to become disruptors themselves. Read more…
Innovation and Entrepreneurship
The first book to present innovation and entrepreneurship as purposeful and systematic discipline which explains and analyzes the challenges and opportunities of America’ s new entrepreneurial economy. Read more…
Cradle to Cradle – Remaking the way we make things
In Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart present an integration of design and science that provides enduring benefits for society from safe materials, water and energy in circular economies and eliminates the concept of waste. Read more…
