Innovation Tournaments: Creating and Selecting Exceptional Opportunities

by Christian Terwiesch, Karl Ulrich

Managers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists all seek to maximize the financial returns from innovation, and profits are driven largely by the quality of the opportunities they pursue. Based on a structured and process-driven approach this book demonstrates how to systematically identify exceptional opportunities for innovation.

An innovation tournament, just like its counterpart in sports, starts with a large number of candidates, with opportunities as the players. These opportunities are pitted against each other until only the exceptional survive.

This book provides a principled approach for the effective management of innovation tournaments - identifying a wealth of promising opportunities and then evaluating and filtering them intelligently for greatest profitability. With a set of practical tools for creating and identifying new opportunities, it guides the reader in evaluating and screening opportunities. The book demonstrates how to construct an innovation portfolio and how to align the innovation process with an organization's competitive strategy.

Innovation Tournaments employs quirky, fresh examples ranging from movies to medical devices. The authors' tool kit is built on their extensive research, their entrepreneurial backgrounds, and their teaching and consulting work with many highly innovative organizations.

Genres: Business, Entrepreneurship

256 pages, Hardcover

First published May 12, 2009

Reviews

[Lawrence Chen · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are few courses about innovation at coursera. This book helps to think and make decision. Fair good, I am still reading it.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good guide on how to spark engagement in the area of innovation in medium and large size companies. This book and underlying course inspired the Global Innovation Tournament series at PayPal!

[E · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delving into innovation techniques

This is one of the better recent books on innovation, although it has a slightly misleading title. Yes, authors Christian Terwiesch and Karl T. Ulrich define and discuss innovation tournaments and their possible role in making organizations more successful at innovating. But the title is too limiting; innovation tournaments are really only a portion of what it offers. In addition to being written in an easy, familiar style and being full of examples and illustrations, the book is rich with tips, models and guidelines to help readers navigate all stages of the innovation process. Terwiesch and Ulrich candidly discuss the necessity of failure and the costs of developing innovations, but they’re also realistic when they describe the benefits. getAbstract recommends their book to managers who are responsible for evaluating ideas and fostering innovation.

[Fred Rose · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is just ok. It's definitely written from a large company standpoint and would be useful for people in strategic and technical management positions. Overall I think most companies will have a pretty specific type of innovation they want to encourage and will have their own filtering techniques. This book is worth a skim to maybe pick up a few ideas.