Book Review: The Innovative Mindset

Title: The Innovative Mindset

Author: Manjul Tewari

Publisher: Manjul Tewari

Quote: "Benjamin set out to create a symphony out of the mundane train ride."

Yes, innovations often are useless when you think about them. More often than not, these days, when "innovation" tends to mean taking something that was working for a reasonable number of people and ruining it in the hope of attracting more or different people. "Innovation is a conversation with customers," Tewari tells readers, but all too often, if that had been true, the customers would have told the companies they didn't want any innovations. Stop. Remember New Coke.

Corporations tend to attract uncreative people and reward uncreative behavior...and then they want a few people, who may be officially designated "creatives" and given offices in a separate part of the building, to come up with creative thoughts about, specifically, ways the companies can make more money. All too often, the companies would make more money not trying to develop new products or services but providing better service with their existing ones. Do you want a laptop with an air whistle on it, or do you want a laptop that runs consistently, without time out for endless useless "updates," and lasts twenty years rather than two? Computers, which have already generated vast amounts of toxic waste, really stand out as a product whose manufacturers need to stop trying new innovations and focus on maintenance, nothing but maintenance, for at least a decade or two. 

Here, in any case, is a clever summary of what older people had to learn from one book at a time like A Whack on the Side of the Head, A Kick in the Seat of the Pants, Black Swan, The Artist's Way, and many more. I don't think any of the exercises in this book for stimulating creative thought is new to me, but what this book adds to the libraries some of us have accumulated is a compact and tidy collection of the exercises that you can store as a file on a computer. The exercises are fun. You may not have realized how much you needed to do them at work, even if what your company needs to think creatively about is not "How can we revolutionize our product?" but "How can we stay interested in maintaining the products we've already sold?"

Recommended.