This week I took the chance to read Sidestep and Twist, the new book on innovation by James Gardner.
James is General Manager at Spigit - the California-based crowd innovation company. I'm thrilled to be working alongside Spigit in delivering idea management and innovation programmes to the clients I work with around Europe and so was pretty keen to get into this book for the latest perspective on why innovation within organisations can be so tough.
This, his latest business book, is based on a pretty controversial premise. Counter-intuitively, he suggests that having the best idea, being the first to market, holding the biggest R&D budget or having world-class leadership provide no guarantees when it comes to delivering highly successful and innovative products and services. Instead, Gardner argues that, knowingly or not, the world's innovation success stories have been built on companies' ability to adopt 'Sidestep and Twist' strategies by taking products and services that are already successful across into new markets - the Sidestep - and by adding remarkable new features which ensure that the products get better and better the more they are used - the Twist.
