Ideas? Easier than ever.
Leading innovation? Trickier than ever...
unless you've got this book
Michael Bungay Stanier
author of The Coaching Habit
Why Do Most Innovation Efforts Fail?
Only 1 in every 50,000 incubated ideas reaches $1 million in sales. If you ask most corporate executives why their companies’ innovation efforts fail, they’ll blame a lack of ideas or not enough big ideas. Innovation expert Robyn M. Bolton knows that innovation isn’t an idea problem, it’s a leadership problem. To drive real innovation, executives must defy the very instincts and behaviors that made them successful operators.
In Unlocking Innovation, Bolton draws on her twenty-five years of advising leaders to provide a practical, holistic innovation framework. Her ABCs of Innovation show leaders how to reshape their roles, teams, and organizations to create new value and catalyze corporate renewal from within. Using real-life stories, Bolton follows innovation leaders’ trajectories from heading up a new team and generating first results to navigating the inevitable crosswinds, complications, and conflicts—and ultimately delivering success.
Unlocking Innovation is an essential guide for any leader tasked with innovating inside an established organization.
How the 0.002% Succeed
ARCHITECTURE
The strategy, structures, processes, governance. metrics and incentives that guide how innovation happens. Executives start here but they know that this work is necessary but not sufficient for success.
BEHAVIOR
The motivations, aspirations, mindsets, attitudes, and approaches that inform and drive every action and interaction. Innovation leaders start and stay focused here because innovation is a leadership problem, and they want to be the solution.
CULTURE
The values of a team or company as demonstrated by leaders’ behaviors and reinforced through the organizational architecture. It’s often a lagging indicator of progress so it requires consistent and long-term commitment.
Unlocking Innovation is the playbook every CXO needs to drive meaningful change and deliver measurable impact.
BEN GEHEB
global chief experience (CX)
strategy officer at VML
Ideas? Easier than ever. Leading innovation? Trickier than ever . . . unless you’ve got this book.
MICHAEL BUNGAY STANIER
author of The Coaching Habit
This is the kind of book you can hand to a new innovation leader and say ‘make it so.’
JOERN KALLMEYER
chief supply chain officer at tms
Robyn's examples...provide the kind of practical wisdom that can accelerate breakthrough discoveries
RACHEL SHA
CEO of Vaxess Technologies
[Robyn] knows how to make innovation happen by introducing the necessary tools and changing the mindset and the culture.
Eric Compton
Former President and CEO
Unlocking Innovation provides a pragmatic three-year guide to setting innovation initiatives up for real, enduring success.
Scott Kirsner
CEO and cofounder of InnoLead
[Robyn] has captured her insights and approach in a book that will let readers benefit from her thinking—just as my colleagues and I did.
Charles Best
CEO of Lakeshore Learning and
founder of DonorsChoose
Unlocking Innovation easily conveys what it takes to lead a team and organization to create ‘something new that creates value’ in the world.
Betsy Frost
CEO of Hoplark
In Unlocking Innovation, Robyn M. Bolton cuts through the noise with practical, mission-driven advice for leaders.
Rob Waldron
Chairman of Curriculum Associates, Inc.
Meaningful innovation is hard; Robyn M. Bolton teaches how to make it attainable.
Elliott Parker
CEO of High Alpha Innovation
Robyn M. Bolton’s approach goes beyond surface-level discussions of vision and culture and delves into the practical steps required to embed innovation within an organization.
NINA HUNTEMANN
chief academic officer of Chegg
Unlocking Innovation is a must-read for anyone looking to build a culture of inno- vation that thrives within the constraints of established organizations.
Brian Ardinger
author of Accelerated: The Guide to
Innovating at the Speed of Change
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robyn M. Bolton is the founder and chief navigator of MileZero, a consultancy that helps leaders use innovation to confidently and consistently grow revenue. She is also an assistant professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where she teaches innovation and strategy courses.
She previously worked at Innosight, the innovation and strategy firm founded by Clayton Christensen; the Boston Consulting Group; and Procter & Gamble, where she helped develop and launch Swiffer. Bolton holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS in marketing from Miami University.
Her writing and perspective have been featured in Fast Company, Harvard Business Review online, the New York Times, and NPR’s Marketplace.
