Customer Reviews

Innovate the Future: A Radical New Approach to IT Innovation

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If you are interested in the future you should buy this book. Innovation is no longer a luxury for the few but a necessity for all. This book is especially important for young people (and those young at heart) so they can translate their ideas into inventions and any invention into a successful innovation. David Croslin tells you how you could do this. Making money or making your mark is no magic. What's required is an understanding of where you are today and where you would like to be tomorrow, and David Croslin provides you the road map. He has an engaging style and a wealth of experience and knowledge which he generously shares so you too can be a successful entrepreneur, innovator, investor, banker or policymaker. This book opened new vistas for me, and can for you as well.

"Innovate the Future" provides business leaders with a clear and concise overview of the evolution of innovation and how to create structure within their organizations to support it. It is one thing to talk about innovation within a business context; it is quite another matter to implement innovation in a meaningful way. David Croslin has created a road map of how to actually achieve the objective.

He distinguishes innovation from invention and provides clarity with respect to what he calls the "Innovation Lifecycle." He then breaks down the wide variety of innovation strategies that are available to companies; how they fit; and what structure needs to be in place to foster their success.

As a turnaround expert and organizational behaviorist, I can tell you that "Innovate the Future" is right on point when it comes to describing the thought process and steps that that are required to make innovation a reality within your organization rather than just a superficial goal. If you are serious about differentiating your market performance through innovation, "Innovate the Future" is a "must read."

This book has a unique way of discussing innovation. It lays out the basics between invention and innovation, does a deep dive study and then uses real use cases to apply it. No matter what you knew about innovation before, you will learn a lot from each chapter.

It is obvious that the author came from a real-world, business background, not an academic one. He converts innovation theory into practice and applies it to our daily business lives with many of his great examples. He has a suspenseful writing style that keeps your eyes on the book until you finish it.

This book is a great companion for travel time in the airplane. Priced very well (below 20$) makes it way worth the money and time. I think it can inspire anyone, from the small business owner to the Fortune 500 CEO. In today's global economy, innovation is the only way forward and this book provides the roadmap. I hope you will enjoy it as I did.

Croslin's book is insightfull, anecdotal, and chock full of helpful figures that spell out the complex business of inventing, marketing and monetizing IP in plain vanilla terms. The book is often provocative as well. As I read, I continuously marked new sections that struck a chord with me (good thing the Kindle has a highlighter). Now, if I could just get my hands on a genuine Ropav (it's mentioned in one of the book's short tales narrating an amusing product branding "what if" scenario).

What a great book! There has been a lot of academic work written on innovation, but this was a truly insightful and pragmatic view of innovation obviously written by someone who has done innovation in corporate America. It was a pleasure to see how this complex topic was turned into a series of bite size chunks that could be easily absorbed and understood along with practical ways to think about innovation in your own environment. For anyone that is attempting to do innovation or has been frustrated with understanding how to get their company to be innovative, this book will help you think about innovation and give you the tools to give your innovation the best chance for being successful.

I'd read some of the academic books in the area of innovation with Clay Christensen's `The Innovators Dilemma' being the classic in the field and helping to define the dotcom boom that subsequently crashed and burned. Except there were those companies that survived and did quite well - Apple, Ebay, Amazon. Google later on and many others. Nuance is another interesting one from the dotcom era.

This book takes a more real world approach than the academic books do. It defines a very detailed `Innovation Lifecycle' that is useful for any business or technical innovation you are considering. There are many stakeholders to satisfy in order to create something that's not only innovative, but useful. The Company Lifecycle, the Market Lifecycle and the Product Lifecycle, demonstrated that there are multiple views of the same processes that are occurring throughout the Innovation Lifecycle.

The concept of `transformative value' was quite useful to me to help understand the aspects of a product and its various stakeholders. The pharmaceutical industry use case in the last chapter made this real for me. You would think that a company would know who their stakeholders are, but the use case shows that to frequently not be the case. As the author points out, what about channel partners, distributors and even investors? What is the transformative value for each of these and how can we maximize it? Sounds obvious, but the application of the lifecycle and methods in the use case results in some `out of box' thinking..

The book is just out, so I haven't grok'd the whole thing. I've read up on the areas discussed above as they had the most immediate appeal to me. I'll give the book a more thorough reading and update my review.

We often speak of Innovation, but what is it "really" and how do you apply it for profit?

I found the answer in this book! I thought initially this book was intended for executives only but find it has a far broader audience. This should be a primer textbook for business students.

Mr. Croslin eloquently walks you through all aspects of truly being innovative and making yourself and your business an industry leader. He brings a new understanding to the dynamics of invention, change, innovation and effect.

His years of experience in applying and honing these methods and providing real success in major industries is explained in plain English, with a bit of humor, tons of easy to understand graphs and a great topic high-light feature called " Bob Should Consider".

I highly recommend "Innovate the Future" by David Croslin to anyone who is looking for a new, proven, outside-the-box perspective on life and growing your business/product market share.

Innovate the future is one of these rare books that really answers questions about innovation. In the books of Clayton Christensen is explained how a much cheaper 'good enough' product can disrupt a market and that the established suppliers are trapped in keeping improve their existing products. A solution for an established supplier is to start a new business unit and act like the new disruptive competitors. This is not a very satisfying solution and David Croslin shows in great detail how it can be done differently. Croslin presents the concept of an innovation life cycle, in anology with the product life cycle. It starts with a disruptive innovation. During time the 'good enough' product is improved by positive incremental innovation. The incremental innovation steps have to be managed carefully. After a while extra 'improvements' of the product have no positive effect anymore. Before that point is reached it is time to start over again with a new disruptive innovation.

In the book you can enjoy the practical experience that Croslin has with the subject on a high level in companies like HP and Verizon and as a consultant specialized in product innovation. Instead of studying the past innovation failures, the book is directed at creating innovation. So you won't get case studies but use cases instead of how the material in the book can be applied to a diversity of markets and products.

Bravo, David Croslin! After 35+ years of reading, writing, thinking and working on the subject of "innovation", I consider this book to be the seminal work. It not only provides a comprehensive theoretical paradigm, but an extremely valuable pragmatic perspective that facilitates transforming Croslin's ideas into actions that create value. Rather than providing a treatise of innovation theory, the book offers readers a proven methodology that can be readily applied by an organization to create high value disruptive innovation.

The author first provides a number of detailed typologies that organize ideas and principles related to inventions and innovations. These typologies can be assembled by the reader to develop a structured framework for understanding the dynamics of creating innovation. Such a framework serves as the basis for entities to conduct internal examinations to discover how within the particular or unique parameters of the organization, strategies can be developed to optimize the creation / development of "transformative" innovations from the entity's intellectual property (inventions).

I foresee using this book on a very frequent basis, and look forward to reading future work by David Croslin. A must read!

I have worked in IT for 25 years. This is the first book that covers innovation in a comprehensive way for an IT organization. It takes a buzz word "innovation" and creates a methodology and process that can be applied across the board. What is great about the book is that it is practical and not the usual "ivory tower" stuff that you see coming out of academics. It also is not the product of some of the latest fad book authors. You can tell that Mr. Croslin has lived and breathed in this space and brings a realism not often found in books of this nature. From a firm perspective, this book should be a guideline for how they use IT to achieve competitive advantage in the marketplace. Further, it should be a tool of how to evaluate strategic IT partners and vendors. From a software company providing IT solutions to the marketplace, this book should be engrained in your total lifecycle (product management, sales, engineering, customer support, etc.). This is a book that can drive your company to excellence in an information economy.