The Innovator's Cookbook: Essentials for Inventing What Is Next [Paperback]

Steven Johnson (Editor)

Book Description

Release date: October 4, 2011

From bestselling author and Internet pioneer Steven Johnson, an essential book for anyone interested in innovation: the key texts on the topic from a wide range of fields as well as interviews with successful, real-world innovators, prefaced with an original essay from Johnson that draws upon his own experiences as an entrepreneur and author.

In The Innovator's Cookbook, Johnson compiles the best and most influential foundational texts and essays from field leaders including Stewart Brand, Clayton Christensen, Richard Florida, Teresa Amabile, Peter Drucker, Amar Bhide, and many more. New conversations on innovation from Ray Ozzie (former chief software architect at Microsoft), Beth Noveck, Jon Schnur, Katie Salen, Tom Kelley, and Brian Eno are included.

Innovation is today’s buzzword for a reason. The need to push forward, find new paths and new ideas in an ever-evolving world, is a vital part of business, of education, of politics, of our daily lives. Building on the success of Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From -- one of the most acclaimed business books of 2010 -- The Innovator's Cookbook makes a major new contribution to this vital conversation.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Steven Johnson is the author of the bestsellers Where Good Ideas Come From, The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map, Everything Bad Is Good For You, and Mind Wide Open, as well as Emergence and Interface Culture. He is the founder of a variety of influential websites—most recently, outside.in—and writes for Time, Wired, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Marin County, California, with his wife and three sons.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Trade; 1 edition (October 4, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594485585
• ISBN-13: 978-1594485589
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #353,783 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #99 in Books > Professional & Technical > Engineering > Patents & Inventions

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 26 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Who Are You and What Have You Done with Stephen Johnson? October 15, 2011

By Windchyme50

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Stephen Johnson has written some amazing books, most particularly his informal "trilogy" including The Ghost Map, The Invention of Air, and most recently, Where Good Ideas Come From. Those three in particular are wonderful in their rich, detailed discussion of how knowledge and ideas advance, how they spring from complex causes in a particular time and place, and how they in turn change the very nature of not just our science and technology but our cultures and views of the world, and of ourselves. They are stupendous achievements.

Sadly, "Innovator's Cookbook" is just... another edited business book. Same old contributers (is Peter Drucker ever NOT in a business book?), same old (sometimes stale, though that may be unfair -- the whole thing just SEEMS stale to me) collection of pet theories and applications (God save us, at least sometimes, from "applications") to business. It frankly just looks like the kind of things publishers do constantly: take a genius writer who reliably churns out bestsellers, and so get him to agree to a quick little job of some kind that has his name on it, because of course they'll sell a million or so of them.

Not that the contributers are necessarily wrong or their pieces badly written, but when I got it out of the package and started to leaf through it, my heart sank. I have grown accustomed to amazing books from Johnson. This was just one more to toss in my old, dust-collecting boxes of trendy business books. Many of the authors have, in their own right, in their own major works, made tremendous contributions (e.g., Richard Florida and yeah, Drucker). But quick rehashes of Florida's stuff (e.g., "Rise of the Creative Class") in another source... isn't worth the eleven or whatever bucks I paid for it.

As I write this review we continue to hear the latest news on the "Occupy Wall Street" protests. In this new millenial environment, where hopefully there can be some creative and earthshaking solutions to our world's more and more urgent problems, contributions that seem to resemble the same old corporate game of sucking every dime out of a "creative" just strike me as sad. I love Stephen Johnson. I don't want him to sacrifice his (gulp) "brand" to become a commodity for some publishing house. This is a book any idiot could have edited. Please, Steven, come back.