Seeing Differently: Insights on Innovation [Hardcover]

John Seely Brown (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1997 | Series: Harvard Business Review Book

John Seely Brown, director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, is the editor of this collection of "Harvard Business Reviews" articles on how innovation occurs differently in today's organizational structures, with new technological tools and new global perspectives. This collection has a broad reach, from relatively technical articles to wide-ranging pieces on strategy, which provides a unique, eclectic, and integrated perspective on innovation.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

John Seely Brown is the Chief Innovation Officer of 12 Entrepreneuring and the Chief Scientist of Xerox. He was the director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) for ten years

Product Details

• Hardcover: 245 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business Press; Reprint edition (April 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0875847552
• ISBN-13: 978-0875847559
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,509,958 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Seely Brown (JSB) is a visiting scholar and advisor to the Provost at University of Southern California (USC) and the Independent Co-Chairman of the Deloitte's Center for the Edge. Prior to that he was the Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and the director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)--a position he held for nearly two decades. He was a cofounder of the Institute for Research on Learning (IRL). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education.

JSB is an avid reader, traveler and motorcyclist. Part scientist, part artist and part strategist, his views are unique and distinguished by a broad view of the human contexts in which technologies operate and a healthy skepticism about whether or not change always represents genuine progress.

His unofficial title has become Chief of Confusion focusing on helping people ask the right questions and make sense out of a constantly changing world.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great anthology of important ideas in strategy, August 31, 1999

By 

Marc Rettig (Pittsburgh, PA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Seeing Differently: Insights on Innovation (Hardcover)

John Seely Brown has done us a big favor: he weeded through the business literature, picked a few authors that really help us "see differently," found works that describe their ideas in tight little packages, and put it all in one book. JSB's own framing comments are also valuable.

Selected highlights: Brian Arthur on increasing returns, Gary Hamel's Strategy as Revolution, Morris and Ferguson on the power of platforms, Brandenburger and Nalebuff on Game Theory for strategy, sections on competitive advantage and managing innovation.

I'm having my interaction design students read this, to add to their palette of points of view.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A well-chosen and valuable collection, February 23, 2005

By 

Bill Godfrey (Mt Stuart, TAS Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Seeing Differently: Insights on Innovation (Hardcover)

The value of a book of reprints mined from HBR's rich archive depends on the quality of selection by the miner. This is the best such anthology I have seen, with an excellent introduction which deserves very careful reading. To quote an early paragraph:

"To do things differently, we must learn to see things differently. Seeing differently means learning to question the conceptual lenses through which we view and frame the world, our businesses, our core competencies, our competitive advantage, and our business models... If there is anything actually coming into focus today, it is the realization that we need to question much of what we think we know about how to conduct commerce, including marketing, distribution, service and the notion of competition itself. Hardest of all, we need to be able to think about changing the architecture of our revenue streams, that is, the way we make money."

Also in the introduction, the author/editor introduces a powerful framework for thinking about innovation opportunities, which he calls QTL4, or Quality through Linking to the world; Listening through those linkages; Learning and reflecting through those listenings; and then Leading. He has applied this framework to selection of the articles for the book.

The opening article is W. Brian Arthur's Increasing Returns and the New World of Business. It challenges one of the most fundamental tenets of classical economics, 'the assumption of diminishing returns: products or companies that get ahead in a market eventually run into limitations, so that a predictable equilibrium of prices and market shares is reached'. He argues that while this still applies in large measure to the bulk-processing economy, increasing returns, 'the tendency for that which is ahead to get further ahead, for that which loses advantage to lose further advantage' tends to reign in the newer part of the economy, the knowledge-based industries.

This has enormous implications for business practice and for national policy. The two worlds of bulk processing and knowledge have different economics, operating side by side. The article works through the implications of operating in the different economies and for those organisations that have to operate simultaneously in both. It is hugely important that not only business people but also politicians and national policy makers understand its implications.

12 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Guilty of errors its authors accuses businesses of makingn, October 25, 1999

By 

Will McWhinney (Venice, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Seeing Differently: Insights on Innovation (Hardcover)

The collection of articles from 1991 to 1996 primarily focuses on differently seeing in manufacturing. They have missed a major discontinuity, and used the fatal strategy in a time of change - listening to the HRB customer's needs, the Hardware industries, with no prescience of E-commerce or Web as vehicles for innovation. Harvard B School, like Sears, had missed the change