The Art of Innovation

With his tour through the inner workings of design firm and idea factory IDEO, Tom Kelley achieves the nearly impossible: He presents creative and innovative observations about creativity and innovation. Toss aside ordinary innovation books and tear into this beautifully constructed showpiece. Kelley distills the often amorphous concepts of brainstorming and teamwork into directives with honest-to-goodness real-life applications. His notions about prototyping are fresh, insightful and practical. His bigger-picture ruminations illustrate not only how organizations should work at innovation, but also how easily dumb bureaucracy can smash creative initiative. If the book has one failing it is that reading it can be a bit like watching a home movie of a friend's children: Your role is clearly to join in the adulation. That aside, getAbstract recommends this treatise as one of the few can't-miss books in the creativity genre.