Innovation Management - The online learning center for Managing Innovation.

One of the challenges leaders face in times of uncertainty and rapid change is helping senior managers to engage in bigger-picture thinking. To enable this process, a growing number of companies are creating “decision rooms” – dedicated areas that help them visualize challenges and opportunities from a number of perspectives and make better decisions.

Nilofer Merchant, in her excellent new book, 11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era, points out that in order for companies to be fast, nimble and innovative enough to survive in today’s Social Era, leaders must meet their workers’ desire to contribute to a mission that matters.

Do you ever find that distractions get in the way of your creative thinking time? Is your mind buzzing, heading off in many different directions, sapping your energy for brainstorming? Tom Wujec, author of Five Star Mind: Games & Puzzles to Stimulate Your Creativity & Imagination, offers a clever solution to this common problem.

In order for innovation to flourish in your organization, your innovation champions must be supported through properly structured responsibilities, goals and resources. Otherwise, they will leave to pursue other opportunities, taking their energy and ideas with them. That’s one of the core messages of Gerard J. Tellis’ new book, Unrelenting Innovation.

Matthew E. May, author of the new book The Laws of Subtraction, believes if we would take a more minimalist approach to our work, seeking ways to get maximum impact with minimum effort, there would be much less waste – and much more innovation.

Word lists, because of their simplicity, are often overlooked as a tool for brainstorming. That’s too bad, because they can be quite powerful and are very easy to use. They leverage the mind’s awesome associative powers to help us uncover new connections, insights and ideas.

Which brainstorming techniques should you use to attack your next innovation challenge? Here are the “super seven” that innovation consultant Bryan Mattimore says have the advantages of being easy to learn, flexible to adapt to different types of creative challenges and are diverse enough to deliver different types of ideas.

For many innovative people, the problem is not coming up with enough ideas, but getting attention for those ideas we decide to implement. To solve this problem, we need to invest more time developing persuasive stories that make an emotional connection with the people we’re trying to influence. That’s the message of Bernadette Jiwa’s terrific book Make Your Idea Matter: Stand Out With a Better Story.

Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon is a wonderful little book that is designed for anyone who is ever has had a desire to create something amazing, but doesn’t know where to start.

Are you a cubicle slave who longs to be their own boss, to take their Really Big Idea and run with it, unencumbered by the shackles of the corporate world? Then you need to pick up Hugh MacLeod’s new book, Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination.