From the Inside Flap
Innovation has the power to reshape the way we live and work. It creates real value for customers and profitable growth for companies. And yet, the mechanisms for stimulating and managing innovation in the workplace remain a puzzle to many executives. This book aims to demystify innovation by describing the forms it takes in industrial organizations, and how excellent companies sustain innovation through effective programs and management. Author Lee Sage describes innovation as an outcome of how companies approach employees, business processes, and technology development. These form the three dimensions of an "innovation building-block" that any company can use to evaluate itself and to improve and sustain its powers of innovation. Winning the Innovation Race identifies practices that leading companies use to innovate on a sustained basis. Most of these practices are drawn from the automotive supply industry-a hotbed of innovation during the past ten years. The book features past winners of the coveted Pace (Premier Automotive Suppliers' Contributions to Excellence) Award. Sage, a cofounder of the Pace Award program, reveals how these excellent companies have learned to constantly reinvent themselves, take risks, encourage their employees to generate ideas, and turn the best of those ideas into innovations that customers value. Dana Corporation, Johnson Controls, Gentex, Daimler Chrysler, Goodyear, Delphi Automotive, and Motorola are among the many companies featured. For manufacturing and product managers, design engineers, R&D professionals, and senior executives, Winning the Innovation Race is an indispensable resource, providing access to the management practices of many of the world's more innovative companies and the insights of their leaders. Readers will learn:
* How the best companies maximize the innovative potential of their employees
* How an innovation-friendly culture can be built and sustained
* Knowledge-management practices that encourage innovation
* Proven methods for identifying future technology requirements
* How executive leadership can encourage more innovation
From the Back Cover
An Inside Look at the Process of Innovation-and How to Make it Work for your Business While the need for innovation is widely recognized, the practices that nurture it elude many executives. Winning the Innovation Race examines the three dimensions of innovation-people, processes, and technology-and provides vivid examples of practices that encourage innovation. This comprehensive book describes the forms that innovation takes in industrial organizations and how superior companies manage to sustain innovation through effective management. The practices of PACE (Premier Automotive Suppliers' Contributions to Excellence) Award-winning companies are used to illustrate how truly innovative companies make the most of their employees, how they treat product development as a "perfectible process," and how they create reward systems that build cultures of innovation. Some of the vital lessons you'll learn in this unique resource:
* The virtue of "cheap failures"
* Why organizational discomfort is needed
* The role of executive leadership
* How to sustain a culture of innovation
