10 Real-World Best Practices For Innovation

The best practices followed by your company when attempting to develop new ideas probably are not such great practices after all. So says former Accenture innovation guru Stephen M. Shapiro in the book, Best Practices are Stupid: 40 Ways to Out-Innovate the Competition (Portfolio Penguin/available in September). Shapiro, a consultant, speaker, and author, served as head of Accenture’s big process and innovation performance practice; in this book, he deconstructs a number of widely-accepted but sometimes ill-advised approaches to inspiration, while offering alternative strategies to better fuel constructive creativity. Shapiro advocates a blend of systemic changes along with a “let ‘em loose” mindset to cultivate a culture of collaboration. So if you spend too many hours in unproductive brainstorming sessions, or find that promising ideas often get so overloaded with input from the masses that they are no longer recognizable, this could be the book for you. For more about the book, click here.