The playing field for businesses is always changing. But one principle remains constant: individuals and companies that innovate will excel. In this groundbreaking guide, entrepreneur John Winsor presents 16 unique perspectives from trail-blazing innovators in companies of all sizes — creative directors, CEOs, brand managers, product developers, and others. Readers will learn how these stellar innovators built powerful brands and created the right environments to foster high levels of creativity. Following each interview, readers will discover a set of tools and recommendations to help them implement the innovator's ideas, including exercises, questions, and space to draw or write their thoughts. Throughout, Winsor weaves his essential premise: it takes more than one brilliant mind to allow innovation to occur. By the end, readers will understand why a true innovator is someone who makes connections with others and realizes the rewards.
John Winsor is a leading strategic marketing and product innovation thinker especially known for his work in collaboration, co-creation and crowdsourcing. He is also a respected author of Baked In: The Power of Aligning Marketing and Product Innovation, Spark: Be more Innovative through Co-Creation and Beyond the Brand: Why Engaging the Right Customers is Essential to Winning in Business. His next book, Flipped: How Bottom-Up Co-creation is Replacing Top-Down Innovation, will be released in April 15, 2010 (Agate). Recently, Baked-In was named as an award winner in the Marketing category for the 800-CEO-Read 2009 Business Book Awards.
Currently, he is the CEO of Victors & Spoils, the world's first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles. V&S provides businesses with a better way to solve their marketing, advertising and product-design problems by engaging the world's most talented creatives. Victors & Spoils launched two months ago, and has been one of the most talked about agency launches of the last decade. Several international media outlets have covered the launch, including Stuart Elliot wrote in the New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/business/media/29adco.html?_r=1
Before V&S, Winsor was the VP/Executive Director of Strategy and Innovation at Crispin, Porter + Bogusky helping the company become the most awarded advertising agency in the world for the last two years. In 2007, Winsor sold his company, Radar Communications, to CP+B. He founded Radar in 1998 with Nike as its first client. Using strategy and academic-based market intelligence tools, Winsor helped some of the country's most progressive companies learn from key voices in their communities through methods he gleaned from his years as a journalist.
Prior to founding Radar, Winsor built a magazine publishing company devoted to sports such as mountain biking, in-line skating, and extreme skiing. In 1990, he acquired the rights to publish a then-struggling magazine, Women's Sports & Fitness. Within three years he turned the magazine around and launched several other highly profitable titles and events including The Gravity Games, selling the business to Conde Nast in 1998.
He also writes a well-known blog, John Winsor, www.johnwinsor.com, and is a regular speaker at marketing and business conferences.
