Book Reviews
May 2012- This special issue of the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) includes a book review of "The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses" by Eric Ries.
The Lean Startup answers the question "How can we build a sustainable organization around a new set of products or services?' (p. 275). The core advice is to implement projects that are "based on fundamental hypotheses that are testable" (p 276).
Ries asserts that "Startup success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught" (p. 3). His stated mission is "to improve the success rate of new innovative products worldwide" (p. 8). The book is written for entrepreneurs around his definition of a startup which is "a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty" (p. 8).
The author's recommendations include (1) Validated Learning, (2) Build-Measure-Learn Feedback Loop, (3) Minimum Viable Product, (4) Innovation Accounting, (5) Pivot or Persevere, and (6) Continuous Deployment.
You can read the review of The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses here. If you have a subscription to this journal, the entire issue is available at www.pdma.org.
July 2011- This issue of the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) includes a book review of "Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love" by Roman Pichler.
Agile Product Management with Scrum, details how product management works in an agile context.
Often Pichler provides a context-specific definition followed by a suggestion. For example, "A product road map is a planning artifact that shows how the product is likely to evolve across product versions, facilitating a dialogue between the Scrum team and the stakeholders... I recommend keeping product road maps simple and focused on the essentials" (p 41). Sometimes the examples are more concise such as "feature soup... Avoid this antipattern" (p 43).
Pichler's empirical insights are best suited to accelerate learning that places customers at the center of development efforts. He asserts that "Applying the product owner role effectively is not only the cornerstone of making agile product management work.
You can read the review of Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love here. If you have a subscription to this journal, the entire issue is available at www.pdma.org.
August 2009- This issue of the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) includes a book review of "Managing Flow: A Process Theory of the Knowledge-Based Firm" by Ikujiro Nonaka, Ryoko Toyama, and Toru Hirata in collaboration with Susan J. Bigelow, Ayano Hirose, and Florian Kohlbacher.
In Managing Flow, the authors present a theoretical model to explain the ''dynamic process of organizational knowledge creation and how it develops the creative capacity called phronesis''. This book provides a scholarly treatment of knowledge creation to actualize new product development that scales from the development team to the multinational enterprise.
The authors build on ideas from philosophers such as Aristotle and Alfred North Whitehead, insightful business leaders, and innovators to convey complex principles that can be embodied in knowledge-based firms. The theoretical portions of the book expound the knowledge activation concepts, and the pragmatic chapters provide examples of successful implementations.
The authors advocate flexible and distributed leadership rather than fixed administrative control so that the organization may ''respond actively to any kind of environmental change because they are engaged in the sustainable practice of turning knowledge into wisdom, aimed at actualizing the corporate vision in real time''.
You can read the review of Managing Flow: A Process Theory of the Knowledge-Based Firm here. If you have a subscription to this journal, the entire issue is available at www.pdma.org.
January 2009- This issue of the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) includes a book review of "Something Really New: Three Simple Steps to Creating Truly Innovative Products" by Denis J. Hauptly.
Hauptly provides his executive management perspective on evaluating the innovation of proposed new product or service projects and on nurturing the organization to support these goals.
Hauptly advises validating a product concept by testing it with "the three most cynical people you know" (p. 67).
Chapter 6 includes insights about implementation. It addresses process and culture. Stated in an oversimplified way, innovation through process implies that brilliant new products can be produced in some formulaic way in a command-and-control organization. According to Hauptly, "The idea that you can take the human factor out and still create innovation seems like the ultimate bureaucratic fantasy to me" (p. 90). Hauptly concludes that a process-driven organization "has a tendency to drive the level of innovation down to a lowest common denominator" (p. 93). Instead of incremental innovation (a pursuit of the status quo characterized by introducing slight modifications such as changes to the product's color), Hauptly encourages development teams to look past short-term revenue needs and pursue projects of high net utility. He discourages bifurcated approaches – where the business culture tries to embrace both a strategy of product line extensions and "higher-risk/higher-reward options" (p. 98) – that do not maximize the potential of a highly innovative environment.
You can read the review of Something Really New here. If you have a subscription to this journal, the entire issue is available at www.pdma.org.
March 2008- This issue of the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) includes a book review of "Designing Interactions " by Bill Moggridge.
For innovators, the book's value is in the insights presented. Other insights are built on eyewitness accounts such as "The Demo that Changed the World" on 9 December 1968. That day, Doug Engelbart and a team from Stanford Research Institute debuted the computer mouse, the graphic user interface, display editing with integrated text and graphics, and hyper-documents. Occasionally, the insights reveal how a diverse career path prepared someone for breakthrough innovations.
Designing Interactions isn't a textbook on how to become a professional interaction designer. It is a book for puzzle solvers. The innovation insights are treasures to be discovered throughout the 766 pages of text and color images. It presents historical glimpses of breakthrough innovations where brilliant pioneers asked, "How can I do this?" and "In the context of technology maturity and market acceptance, is the timing right for my implementation?"
You can read the review of Designing Interactions here. If you have a subscription to this journal, the entire issue is available at www.pdma.org.
November 2007- This issue of the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) includes a book review of "Innovation on Demand: New Product Development Using TRIZ" by Victor R. Fey and Eugene I. Rivin.
Innovation on Demand explores the improvement of existing technologies and technological forecasting. It is for product engineers who demand more than problem-solving analogies. The authors have produced a textbook that includes rigorous topics such as a substance-field language, a sequence of logical procedures to analyze problems, and procedures to develop compromise-free design solutions.
You can read the review of Innovation on Demand: New Product Development Using TRIZ here. If you have a subscription to this journal, the entire issue is available at www.pdma.org.
July 2007- This issue of the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) includes a book review of "Swarm Creativity: Competitive Advantage through Collaborative Innovation Networks" by Peter A. Gloor.
Swarm Creativity is devoted to a better way of working together through project networks. Gloor defines a collaborative innovation network (COIN) as ‘‘a cyberteam of self-motivated people with a collective vision, enabled by the Web to collaborate in achieving a common goal by sharing ideas, information, and work’’ Characteristically, COINs are self-organizing, open systems. They are not collaborative, virtual teams set up by management.
Gloor’s contribution is the enumeration of a set of principles to improve the probability of incubating a successful collaboration network.
You can read the review of Swarm Creativity: Competitive Advantage through Collaborative Innovation Networks here. If you have a subscription to this journal, the entire issue is available at www.pdma.org.
May 2007- This issue of the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) includes a book review of "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More" by Chris Anderson.
The long tail phenomenon alerts innovators—those who must match businesses and market needs with available technology—that a paradigm shift is under way. The way that product concepts are selected, developed, and commercialized is evolving.
You can read the review of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More here. If you have a subscription to this journal, the entire issue is available at www.pdma.org.
September 2006- This issue of the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) includes reviews of three books on Six Sigma.
- Service Design for Six Sigma: A Roadmap for Excellence
- Axiomatic Quality: Integrating Axiomatic Design with Six-Sigma, Reliability, and Quality Engineering
- Design for Six Sigma as Strategic Experimentation
You can read the review of these three books here. If you have a subscription to this journal, the entire issue is available at www.pdma.org.
November 2005- The November issue of the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) includes a book review of Joan Schneider's book "New Product Launch: 10 Proven Strategies." Schneider defines launch as "A powerful, multidisciplinary process that successfully propels a new product or service into the marketplace… and sustains it over time." Further, it declares, "The process of planning and executing an effective new product launch has never been more difficult nor the stakes higher, for both the companies launching the new product and the people involved in the launch."
You can read the review of New Produt Launch: 10 Proven Strategies here. If you have a subscription to this journal, the entire issue is available at www.pdma.org.
March 2005- The March issue of the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) includes a book review of Matthias Holweg's and Frits K. Pil's book "The Second Century: Reconnecting Customer and Value Chain through Build-to-Order; Moving beyond Mass and Lean Production in the Auto Industry." This book contrasts two automotive industry supply chain strategies: forecast-based business models and build-to-order business models. A key insight for innovators and developers is that “Companies seem to have forgotten that profitability comes, not from optimizing cost, but from building the right product at the right time.” (p. 2)
You can read the review of The Second Century here. If you have a subscription to this journal, the entire issue is available at www.pdma.org.
July 2004 - The July issue of the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) includes a book review of Bhaskar Chakravorti's book "The Slow Pace of Fast Change: Bringing Innovations to Market in a Connected World." Innovation adoption occurs at a slower rate because of market inefficiencies due to fragmented and privately motivated forms of decision making. The “slower rate” implication is the basis for the book’s title.
You can read the review of The Slow Pace of Fast Change here. If you have a subscription to this journal, the entire issue is available at www.pdma.org.
