I don’t know if your parents are like this, but my mom always sends a bag of stuff home with me whenever I visit. Most of the time, it is magazines she has finished reading (when I was in college, she would fill out all of those offers where you send in three proofs of purchase to get some free t-shirt and put my dorm address as the send-to).
In this week’s bag was the Spring 2006 edition of BusinessWeek SmallBiz. The cover story is “ideas that BLOOM”. The article profiles Numi Tea, Benjamin Obdyke, and Bravado Designs. It talks about their efforts to be more innovative.
Kathryn From, CEO of Bravado, uses books with her management team to foster innovation. She says in the article: “We recently read Good To Great by Jim Collins and spent half a day talking about how we can use it.”
On the same page is an outstanding list of books on innovation (kudos to writer Diane Brady):
- The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley with Jonathan Littman
- The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
- Orbiting The Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie
- 10 Rules for Strategic Innovators by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble
- The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley
- Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Rene Mauborgne
- The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson
- Harvard Business Review on Innovation by Clayton Christensen et al.
