Built to Innovate: Essential Practices to Wire Innovation into Your Company’s DNA

Digital disruption, changing markets, evolving customer needs, and increasingly fierce competition—all in a time of political and social upheaval—are making the job of leading a business more difficult than ever. How do you keep your company moving forward in such an unpredictable, fast-paced world? Two words: Systematic innovation. Innovation of all kinds driven by everyone in the organization is the dream of most business leaders. Built to Innovate shows how to turn it into reality. It’s about keeping your eye on the process (innovating), not the end product (innovation)—a simple but critical distinction that makes all the difference between success and failure. Innovation expert, professor, and former Dean of Executive Education at INSEAD, Ben M. Bensaou explains how to develop and implement a rational, step-by-step program for: • Generating valuable improvements and changes in every aspect of operations • Developing and implementing new product ideas, process improvements, customer service enhancements, new business models, and more • Empowering everyone in the organization—from frontline employees to midlevel managers to senior leaders—to contribute to innovating • Creating teams that jump-start the work of innovating organization-wide • Producing innovative ideas that bring new value to customers—both internally and externally Through case studies from a wide range of top companies, including BASF, Allianz, W. L. Gore, Kordsa, Fiskars, Samsung, Marvels Studios, Domino’s Pizza, and Starwood, Bensaou illustrates how his methods have delivered remarkable results. Each of these companies demonstrates that innovating can become a habit—one that provides an organization with a powerful advantage over its competitors. Depending on flashes of creativity and inventiveness to drive organization-wide innovation isn’t a strategy. Long-term success today requires a systematic approach to wiring innovation into your business’s DNA. Use the proven methods in this unparalleled guide to recreate your company into an organization that’s Built to Innovate. (Book written with the assistance of Karl Weber)