Reading :: IGNITE

IGNITE: Setting your Organization's Culture on Fire with Innovation
By Randal C. Moss and David J. Neff

I just posted this review on this book's Amazon page (where I gave the book five stars). I'm crossposting it here:

In 2011, Neff and Moss published The Future of Nonprofits, a terrific book that explained how to innovate—and set up an innovation culture—within a nonprofit environment. But for-profit companies need innovation cultures too. So in this follow-up book, Moss and Neff discuss how to understand, diagnose, and improve an organization's innovation culture.

Neff and Moss provide lucid definitions of innovation and entrepreneurship, along with clear examples. Based on these, they discuss how to diagnose your organization's internal culture. They describe how to keep innovative employees, assemble an innovation team, and bring in external insights via crowdsourcing. Building on these insights, they lead us through updating the organizational design to better support innovation; farming and improving ideas; articulating value; launching a proof-of-concept; and using both internal and external motivation.

In the process, they cover a wide range of ideas, from organizational culture to organizational design; from internal team dynamics to external crowdsourcing and cocreation; from change management to the business model canvas; from prototyping to gamifying. That's a lot of ground to cover, but the authors tie these topics together well, using lots of illustrations and pointing to appropriate books for more information.

If you are wondering how to turn your organization's culture into an innovation culture, pick up this book.