William Duggan's 2007 book, Strategic Intuition, showed how innovation
really happens in business and other fields and how that matches what
modern neuroscience tells us about how creative ideas form in the human
mind. In his new book, Creative Strategy, Duggan offers a step-by-step
guide to help individuals and organizations put that same method to work
for their own innovations.
Duggan's book solves the most important problem of how innovation
actually happens. Other methods of creativity, strategy, and innovation
explain how to research and analyze a situation, but they don't guide
toward the next step: developing a creative idea for what to do. Or they
rely on the magic of "brainstorming"--just tossing out ideas. Instead,
Duggan shows how creative strategy follows the natural three-step method
of the human brain: breaking down a problem into parts and then
searching for past examples to create a new combination to solve the
problem. That's how innovation really happens.
Duggan explains how to follow these three steps to innovate in business
and any other field as an individual, a team, or a whole company. The
crucial middle step--the search for past examples--takes readers beyond
their own brain to a "what-works scan" of what others have done within
and outside of the company, industry, and country. It is a global search
for good ideas to combine as a new innovation. Duggan illustrates
creative strategy through real-world cases of innovation that use the
same method: from Netflix to Edison, from Google to Henry Ford. He also
shows how to integrate creative strategy into other methods you might
currently use, such as Porter's Five Forces or Design Thinking.
Creative Strategy takes the mystery out of innovation and puts it
within your grasp.
