Customer Reviews

Breakthrough: Stories and Strategies of Radical Innovation

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Mark and Barbara Stefik's guide to innovation is based on their belief that the new century demands that business foster inventive strategies. The authors tell inventors, entrepreneurs and managers what they can and must do to achieve breakthrough innovations. They explain the basis for innovation, the context of invention and what breakthroughs mean in terms of business strategy for the twenty-first century. The authors based their research on interviews with inventors and managers, including many from the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Their book is thorough, clearly written and packed with anecdotes, although at times it suffers from erratic organization. We find that the authors do a very good job of introducing the elements of innovation to a general business readership.

As an inventor, I found this book useful. The authors explore the theme of radical innovation. Of the creating of breakthrough inventions that can in turn create new markets and experiences. The book cites many examples. Perhaps most notably that of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). As is well known to many in technology, PARC developed the seminal concepts of a mouse, icons and window based user interface. Though sadly Xerox benefitted not a whit from this.

A constant question in the book is how to discover those breakthroughs. Or, restated, how to devise an environment that can nuture such events and the people that bring them about. The authors assert that what they term "open innovation" can never lead to breakthroughs. However, truly original creativity is such a fragile and intangible thing that the book doesn't really offer a deterministic approach to finding and applying it. But perhaps no book can.