| | |  | John Seely Brown | | Home » | | | | | | | Product Promotions: | | | | | Description: | | | Scott Berkun Discusses Innovation at Amazon.com Headquarters | | Scott Berkun, author of The Myths of Innovation and The Art of Project Management, visited Amazon.com to discuss "epiphany myths" and the realities--and effort--of implementing innovation in your own life and work. Watch the video: - High bandwidth
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Praise for The Myths of Innovation:
"…Small, simple, powerful: an innovative book about innovation."
--Don Norman, Nielsen Norman Group, Northwestern University; author of Emotional Design and Design of Everyday Things
"The naked truth about innovation is ugly, funny, and eye-opening, but it sure isn't what most of us have come to believe. With this book, Berkun sets us free to try to change the world unencumbered with misconceptions about how innovation happens."
--Guy Kawasaki, author of The Art of the Start
"This book cuts through the hype, analyzes what is essential, and more importantly, what is not. You will leave with a thorough understanding of what really drives innovation."
-- Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com |  |
| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Scott Berkun | | Hardcover:
| 192 pages | | Publisher:
| O'Reilly Media, Inc. | | Publication Date:
| May 15, 2007 | | ISBN:
| 0596527055 | | Package Length:
| 8.5 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.8 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.9 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.7 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 35 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
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 The Myths of InnovationJul 31, 2008
A very infomative and entertaining read. The book opens your eyes to a lot of things you usually take foregranted.
1 of 2 found the following review helpful:
 DisappointingJun 23, 2008
This book is not all that. Its just a bunch of meandering ramblings from a guy whose main qualification seems to be that he worked on Internet Explorer at Microsoft. It creates just as many rah rah myths as it challenges. It is poorly written, the author is wholly devoid of any gravitas, and thus does not offer many coherent or believable insights. I suppose the bibliography is useful, for finding a real book, which this one is not.
Excellent book for people working to innovate, and even for those curious or unsure about what innovation means or how to do itJun 18, 2008
I recommend Scott Berkun's book The Myths of Innovation to everyone willing to trade a couple hours of reading and thinking for a deeper understanding of what's holding you back in your creative endeavours, and some alternatives to help you get out of your rut.
In Myths Scott lists 10 myths, one per chapter, which hamper people from innovating. His chapters begin by explaining some important things we've been lead to believe about inventing and innovation simply by living in our culture (U.S.A.). Those myths conspire to disempower people who do want to change things: a theme that repeats as Scott examines each myth in turn. After describing these implicit, limiting, and usually deeply ingrained memes Scott gives different perspectives for each myth including tales about popular people and inventions that may surprise you.
At first glance the chapters seemed more management-centric than I'd expected. However unless you are inventing in isolation (which cannot happen: see Chapter 5) and never need interact with other people, each of Scott's insights could be important to you, too. After all innovation doesn't just mean coming up with a patentable object to sell: any change to how people work, play, or view the world can be innovative and have similar challenges.
This was a great book for me since I've had hundreds of ideas of things to fix or create, but I hadn't realized how many damaging cultural myths about innovation I had accepted over the years. Even though Scott's writing and examples make the book easily readable and it is small enough to finish in a few hours, I took several breaks while devouring Myths and reread parts so I could absorb all the new information presented.
The Myths of Innovationis a fairly short book, but with Scott's writing that means it is packed with interesting content and clearly explains both myths and truths about innovation. Scott's ideas and the book's layout, black-and-white photos and illustrations, and extras like a colophon, ranked bibliography, and a useful index mean it is easy to reference, inviting to reread, and a springboard to free your own innovation.
Enjoy!
0 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 I'm a Scott Berkun fan, but this one didn't do it for me. Jun 16, 2008
I really liked Art of Project Management so had high expectation for this book. It took me a while to get engaged into this one, and while there are lots of interesting tidbits, I really didn't find something that sticks to my ribs. Filling, but not satisfying.
Simple, straight and to the pointJun 09, 2008
What I liked about this book is its simplicity, and the organized way of presenting ideas. This book contains a lot of information about what is wrong about innovation, as well as the right way to do things.
If you like to think "out of the box", and find solutions out of the norm, this book is definitely for you...
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