The Radical Innovation Playbook: A Practical Guide for Harnessing New, Novel or Game-Changing Breakthroughs by Olga Kokshagina and Allen Alexander

The Radical Innovation Playbook: A Practical Guide for Harnessing New, Novel or Game-Changing Breakthroughs by Olga Kokshagina and Allen Alexander
Buy The Radical Innovation Playbook: A Practical Guide for Harnessing New, Novel or Game-Changing Breakthroughs by Olga Kokshagina and Allen Alexander at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Business and Finance
Reviewer: Sue Magee
Summary: An indispensable 'how-to-do-it' manual and workbook to help you develop new ideas. Highly recommended. Olga Kokshagina and Allen Alexander popped into Bookbag Towers to chat to us.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 180	Date: October 2020
Publisher: De Gruyter
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 978-3110641295
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So, why bother? Every time you set out to do something new you end up with the same thing in a slightly different form and quite a bit of money spent. Why not just leave it as it is? After all, it's roughly working, isn't it?

You might not have said it, but you've probably thought it. You've also thought the small, incremental improvements which you have been able to make - the optimisation of your core business with cost efficiencies wherever possible, the extension of your existing products into new areas - haven't really delivered in terms of growth. It's been manageable and largely risk-free but you could easily be challenged by a competitor who takes a more radical approach. You've merely kept the business ticking over and there's a nagging suspicion in the back of your mind that an organisation designed for the twentieth century might not survive in the twenty-first. What you need is innovation - radical innovation.

In his foreword to The Radical Innovation Playbook, Prof. John Bessant quotes Richard Leifer's definition of 'radical'. A radical innovation should offer some combination of:

- totally new performance features
- performance or feature improvement at least five times greater than current and
- significant reduction in cost, at least by 30%

Organisations looking at radical innovation are aiming to create growth potential - increasing revenue - rather than looking to cost efficiencies to increase profit. But where do you start? This is where The Radical Innovation Playbook comes in. It's a how-to-do-it manual and workbook and its aim is to help you collect and analyse as much information as you need to substantiate your decisions to launch (or not!) Innovations are often seen as a threat and they're going to challenge - so they're unlikely to be brought to market from within the existing business. You're going to have to think about taking the innovation away from the core business and Olga Kokshagina and Allen Alexander will guide you through the benefits and drawbacks of each option. You will need to accept the possibility of failure but by using the playbook you should be able to get the process right.

Bringing innovation to market occurs in four phases: discovery, exploration, prepare for take off and landing. This isn't linear: one phase isn't completed before the next begins. You're going to discover that more work is required in one of the earlier areas, that more market research needs to be done or even that the original idea has been changed - but you have a structure. In each section, you'll be given the background to your thinking - areas you need to explore - taken through some examples (you might even call them case studies) and then you get to fill in your own bit of the workbook - but even here there are examples to guide you. There are even suggestions as to how you can find alternatives and you'll be directed to books if you need further information or guidance.

The book is laid out so that it's an easy read, with lots of illustrations and box-outs but don't get the idea that the content is light. It isn't. It's also demanding. Your idea is going to be mined: there are dozens of questions to be answered and possibly revised at a later date. You'll establish pain points but as you read you will be left with an 'I could do this' feeling and there's a great deal of reassurance packed between the covers, particularly about the sort of flack you'll receive from within your own company if your idea is truly innovative. I was left wishing that I had a decent idea of my own!

It's not a quick read. The 180 pages contain technical concepts which might well be new to the average businessman or woman. Take your time, absorb as much as you can and then go back and study particularly relevant areas again. And when you get to the end you just might find that you have something very valuable.

I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy of the book to the Bookbag.

I'm going to shelve this book next to Creating Value Through Technology: Discover the Tech that Can Transform Your Business by Andrew Hampshire. I've also thought about using AI in my business.

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