The Five Ways to Innovate
A guide to how the best innovators in the world build the business of tomorrow
Coming to a bookstore near you in 2023
A brief excerpt from the book
My team and I are sitting in a boardroom in Bangkok. The oppressive heat and cacophony of traffic from the outside world are muted in the expansive open plan office space. The industrial chic of polished concrete, exposed metal and spotless glass are offset by splashes of manicured greenery. A fixie bicycle stands in the corner, an extravagant reminder that the hipsterisms of the Western world have well and truly penetrated Southeast Asia.
Our client is the Chief Innovation Officer who is leading the innovation efforts of one of Thailand's leading companies. She's flanked by her team sitting across the table from ours. The conversation is convivial, but she keeps asking in increasing detail about how they might replicate the digital transformation program our firm delivered that helped a global chain become #1 in North America. We try in many possible ways to steer the conversation to several alternate innovation approaches. She persists. We delicately explain that her preferred approach is unlikely to work in this case: there are huge cultural differences between the US and Thailand that shape consumer behaviour; market forces and the competitive landscape vary drastically from those in the US; and of course in the innovation space where timing is everything, it simply doesn't make sense to mimic a case study that's since become fairly industry standard. We cite the fact that the very same global chain had actually tried to repeat their own winning formula in China and failed miserably because they ignored these critical differences.
Finally I hear the words come out of my mouth as if on their own: "If all you're doing is copying your competitor, it no longer counts as innovation". The room falls silent. The meeting ends soon afterwards. All very civil. We shake hands and say we'll be in touch. The CIO gives us a recommendation for a great local restaurant to try while we're in town. We exit the building, stepping out into the scorching mid-afternoon heat, our voices drowned out by the noise of traffic.
Two weeks after the meeting, we receive word that they've chosen to go in another direction and work with another firm. They will in fact be copying the global chain's North American strategy after all.
Three years later and they still haven't launched anything new.
Do we need another book on innovation?
If you’re looking for more of the same vanilla case studies about Ford / SouthWest Airlines / P&G / <insert generic brand name here>, this ain’t the book for you.
This book is what happens when you get a Facebooker (Amer Iqbal) and a Googler (Roshan Chhotu) to share stories from their collective 30 years of experience in the world of corporate innovation. Through a series of interviews with innovation leaders, stories from their own lives, and a healthy dose of pop-culture references, this is a different kind of business book.
Based on Amer Iqbal’s highly popular keynote presentation of the same name, the book version contains:
First hand anecdotes and stories from real innovation leaders
A detailed breakdown of the 5 Ways framework, including 20 case studies
A CIO’s handbook with detailed workshop and 100 day playbook