Frans Johansson
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By: Harvard Business School Press
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 36
Average rating: 4.5 of 5
A great read 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.
A great book on innovation and outside the box thinking. Many innovators may find that their thinking, curiosity, and intuitiveness are outlined in the pages of this book. Use it as a catalyst for new ideas and possibilities. Ideation, in today's world, must have a broader scope and more examination. This book will help spark the possibilities within you.
Quick, Quick Delivery 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 4 people found this review helpful.
My daughter needed this book for a class in college. I paid extra for next day delivery and it was here the next day.
The Road to Systematic Innovation? 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.
At first glance, "The Medici Effect" can seem like yet another quick-read business book that simply restates the obvious. The author's basic thesis is this: to spur innovation, we must bring people together from different backgrounds and disciplines.
Well, that seem true enough... Just visit Thomas Edison's complex at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, for an early example of this so-called "intersection of innovation." (Museum curators have done a fantastic job reconstructing his entire laboratory.)
What saves this book from the dust pile is the author's willingness to go beyond the easy answers. Brainstorming can often fail, says Johansson, and he spells out the most common pitfalls in great detail. Likewise, he says that building a culture of innovation must include both punishments and rewards for those involved -- even if those rewards are largely intangible. "Positive failure" is another powerful concept -- the idea that failure can be encouraged, managed and optimized for faster innovation.
Johansson illustrates his main point with a dozen or more entertaining anecdotes from a wide variety of fields, ranging from neurobiology at Brown University to video games to the restaurant business.
Along the way, he provides practical guidelines for team leaders and team members alike. Johansson knows that innovation isn't limited to PhD's in white lab coats or oddball geniuses with bad teeth. All of us are capable of (at least contributing to) breakthrough innovations, given the right support system and organizational attitude.
Of all the concepts Johansson presents, I found his section on "associative barriers" to be the most interesting. Here's a quick summary: As we become more knowledgeable about a particular field, we also begin to limit our cognitive freedom to make strange, unpredictable associations. For example, if I say "police," most people would associate that word with things like crime, violence, jail, justice or lawbreakers. Relatively few would jump to other associations, such as childhood disease or solar energy. By breaking down these associative barriers, we can see new connections and find new solutions to seemingly intractable problems.
If you don't have time to read the entire book (short as it is), I strongly recommend this section. The Medicis would certainly approve.
Editorial Review:
Why do so many world-changing insights come from people with little or no related experience? Charles Darwin was a geologist when he proposed the theory of evolution. And it was an astronomer who finally explained what happened to the dinosaurs. Frans Johansson’s The Medici Effect shows how breakthrough ideas most often occur when we bring concepts from one field into a new, unfamiliar territory, and offers examples how we can turn the ideas we discover into path-breaking innovations.
