Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire

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Get back that innovation mojo!

Innovation BonfireStoking Your Innovation Bonfire – A Roadmap to a Sustainable Culture of Ingenuity and Purpose” is the new book from Braden Kelley. This book on identifying and removing barriers to innovation, published by John Wiley & Sons, is now available at all of the Amazon online bookstores (USA, UK, DE, FR, JP, CA) and many other retailers around the world.

What People Are Saying

Steve Faktor - American Express“Innovation is all about taming the unknown. In large companies, the unknown often goes unfunded. Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire arms you with the case studies you need to go from random spark to a steady burn.”

  • Steve Faktor, Vice President, Business Growth and Innovation, American Express

Chris Thoen - Procter & Gamble“Innovation is essential for the long-term success of companies. Braden Kelley provides individuals, organizations, and companies with a very powerful matchbox (tools and insights) to vigorously light their innovation bonfires! A must-read.”

  • Chris Thoen, Managing Director, Global Open Innovation Office, Procter & Gamble

Mark Bernstein - PARC“Braden Kelley has delivered a book that helps people move innovation from theory into practice. Given our experience innovating with clients over the past 40 years, I believe Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire shares many useful strategies and case studies showcasing what works. Most importantly, the book helps managers identify and address the barriers to innovation within their organization – a crucial step towards making sustainable change.”

  • Mark Bernstein, CEO of PARC

Moises Norena“Braden has been able to abstract the realities of innovation in his book – this is not theory or science fiction, it is about valuable lessons from real-life examples that those in charge of innovation should be aware of if they want to design winning strategies.”

  • Moises Noreña, Director of Global Innovation, Whirlpool Corporation

Joe Boggio - Microsoft“Braden Kelley helps to demystify innovation, helping the reader to understand how to deliver strong and sustainable yield from their innovation efforts. Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire is a great primer for any organization focused on advancing their approach to innovation.”

  • Joe Boggio, Director of Innovation, US Commercial Sector, Microsoft Corporation

Drew Boyd“Without knowing it, organizations drift towards bad habits and blind spots that shut off innovation. Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire ‘unpacks’ the blockages standing in the way of growth so leaders understand how to move the organization forward.”

  • Drew Boyd, Executive Director, Master of Science in Marketing Program, Assistant Professor of Marketing and Innovation, University of Cincinnati

The Opportunity

Stoking Your Innovation BonfireIt’s no secret that executives are under escalating pressure to deliver increasing profits every quarter. In such a pressure-cooker environment, the only way that companies can hope to meet the lofty expectations of the market is to hard-wire their organizations to be mindful of costs while simultaneously pursuing innovation.

Innovation is about change, and organizations and individuals resist change. But, if you look around the business ecosystem, you’ll see that the companies that successfully innovate in a repeatable fashion and stay at the top of their industries have one thing in common – they are good at managing change.

Current business books target managers with visions of utopia that assume a completely new organization, but don’t provide a roadmap for how to get there. These books often are long on theoretical visions and short on practical implementation advice, leaving the reader to believe they need expert advice to achieve this utopia.

Innovation has become the focus not only for businesses, but for governments, and whole economies too, as countries seek to secure high paying jobs for their citizens and their tax base. Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire will help managers identify blockages that have crippled the innovation superpowers that made the organization successful. Managers that read and absorb this book will be able to make immediate changes in their organization to recapture its original innovative spirit. This will help them leverage the collective wisdom and passion of all of their employees to continuously innovate for customers in a sustainable way.

Newsflash!

eBook Devices for Stoking Your Innovation BonfireWith the growing popularity of e-readers, it was important to me that my book is available for people to read however and wherever they wish. Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire is available as an e-book for Kindle from Amazon (USA and UK) and Nook from Barnes & Noble.com. Enjoy the book on your iPad, Kindle, Nook, PC, or Mac before it is widely available.

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The Concept

Every successful organization began as a nimble, innovative startup with the ability to course-correct and quickly adapt to the needs of its customers. But along the way, success and growth cause changes in the structure, the culture, and sometimes even the vision of organizations. Successful, growing organizations often focus on driving out the operational inefficiencies they maintained during their startup phase, and unintentionally erect barriers to innovation along the way.

When organizations realize that they need to innovate, they find that they struggle to do so. Often organizations make the mistake of copying the artifacts they observe or read about in case studies to boost their innovation. Instead, organizations need to look internally to build new organizational capabilities that will enable them to create their own artifacts.

Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire will help readers identify the innovation blockages specific to their organization and teach them the fundamental changes that will help their organizations rebuild their hidden or lost innovation capabilities. Where appropriate we will leverage and evolve other leading innovation theories into coherent, practical applications that readers can implement in reinvigorating their organizations themselves – without expensive consultants.