The Heart of Innovation: A Field Guide for Navigating to Authentic Demand

Four innovation experts from the startup world, large enterprises, nonprofits, and academia come together to reveal the secret of uncovering authentic demand and building successful innovations around it.

Most innovators are stuck, whether or not they realize it. They want their innovations to become part of the lives of their customers, clients, or beneficiaries. But people are already coping with their busy lives; new ideas and inventions rarely spark any change at all.  

At the Center for Deliberate Innovation at Georgia Tech, the authors have worked with scores of startups and large companies, developing a unique methodology that unpacks the “black box” of authentic demand and shows innovators how to search for it, recognize it, and create situations for their customers that catalyze it. They explore the differences, and different challenges, to the three types of innovation—incremental improvement, company transformation, and radical “formative” innovation.

Authors Chanoff, Furst, Sabbah, and Wegman take innovators and people who work with them on a new journey through innovation. Their fresh case studies, from IBM’s entry to the Web, to a single mother in a slum in Kenya, make The Heart of Innovation as obsessively readable as it is informative.

If customers are already pulling your innovation from your hands, you don’t need this book. Otherwise, reach for The Heart of Innovation.