Invent Business Opportunities No One Else Can Imagine

Rating:
Summary: Long checklist of questions and practical ideas you can use
Review: The author provides a long list of thoughts, questions, recommendations and ideas that you can use to generate new products and services for your business.

The book is easy to read and the recommendations are explained very well.

One reviewer said this book didn't match up to Drucker's book on Innovation. And, most would certainly agree. But using that criteria perhaps only 0.1 % of the business books would be comparable to Drucker, the sage of business management. Drucker's book might be a 8 or 9 on a 5 point scale (i.e. home run out of the ball park), while this one is one of the top 20 business books for the year it was published - what I would call a solid 5 star ranking.

Although he offers lots of great advice, I found his questions the most useful - particularly in the product innovation area. He covers many of the newer concepts on innovation by other authors, and integrates them into a nice package.

John Dunbar
Sugar Land, TX

Rating:
Summary: Business and management coverage, but little that's concrete
Review: There's some excellent information about how to manage your teams, making sure that you and your people keep an eye on trends in the industry, and also good cautionary tales about not getting too wrapped up in your current success.

Unfortunately, history has proven parts of this book to be risky if taken literally. For instance, Enron is given as an example of a great, innovative company. I know that it's hard to have seen the failure coming, but still, it points out some risks in getting too caught up in broad ideas without properly estimating the real business opportunity. There's a lot of talk in the book about how to brainstorm markets and user needs, but very little about what to do with it. The implication is that you should just run off and go with an idea as soon as you imagine a trend; however, it's worth thinking about how you should transform your business and whether you could actually be profitable in your new venture. There are a lot of other great books in this space; I'd look at least at _Innovator's Solution_ to get more information about running your company without getting too stuck on your successes.

Rating:
Summary: A few good ideas
Review: This book is written by a business seminar leader and, not surprisingly, has the ring of an Anthony Robbins seminar.

Turock offers some good suggestions for looking at markets and customers in a way that may bring out opportunities for innovation in your business. He also provides a strategic planning process based on causing revolutionary innovation - as opposed to incremental change of the status quo.

My criticism of Turock is that he makes vague and often trite generalizations that trivialize the difficult process of developing and implementing effective innovations - as though he had never managed a company himself (which I do not think he has).

The book is a quick read and probably worthwhile because it just might prompt that one innovative thought that turns out to be a haymaker.

I recommend Innovation and Entrepreneurship - Practice and Principles by Peter F. Drucker for a more structured and comprehensive methodology for innovation and competitive strategy.