Discover the Secret Recipe for Jumpstarting Your Innovation Team

A short, fun and to-the-point guide from the Dean of Innovation on how to jumpstart your company’s innovation

Ann Arbor, MI (July 8, 2014) – Quality and efficiency are no longer enough if your organization wants to grow. Innovation is now required. Imagine having a foolproof innovation checklist that will enable your company to succeed every time. Imagine knowing four simple steps that can make collaborative innovation happen in your organization in a fun and entertaining way. In his book, Making Stone Soup: How to Jumpstart Innovation Teams (eBook, July 8, 2014), professor, author and innovator Jeff DeGraff shares his simple and clear recipe on how to use a little creativity to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

In the classic children’s story, Stone Soup, three hungry strangers come to a wary village and set an empty cauldron in the town square. Using only their imagination, cleverness and ability to improvise, they quickly enlist the skeptical townsfolk, one by one, until each has contributed a little something to the sumptuous feast. “Whether you are launching an innovation team, leading a creative project or developing a novel solution, Making Stone Soup gives you everything you need to make that feast happen,” says Jeff DeGraff. “The recipe—steps on setting high quality targets, enlisting deep and diverse domain experts, taking multiple shots on goal, and learning from experience and experiments—are easy to understand and follow.” To help you get started, the book includes free resources such as a how-to jumpstart video, an innovation leadership assessment and access to a wide array of articles on innovation.

“Innovation has been thrust from research and development labs into operating units that have little experience or expertise in how to make innovation happen,” says Dr. DeGraff. “Speed is imperative for creating breakthrough solutions. Teams need to be more agile and move quicker to achieve results faster than their competitors by working across discipline and region boundaries.” Making Stone Soup provides proven solutions for making innovation happen for companies. Top shelf innovators, such as Coca-Cola, GE and Johnson & Johnson, as well as hundreds of non-profits including the Association of Art Museum Directors, the Kellogg Foundation and the League of American Orchestras, have successfully used the methods Dr. DeGraff outlines.

Dr. DeGraff states, “Making Stone Soup connects the dots to sync up collaborative innovation in complex organizations and doesn’t require any special training or changes to how the organization is structured or operates. It’s about starting with the desired results of the innovation initiatives and identifying the appropriate composition of the team and specific innovation practices required to achieve these results.” Dr. DeGraff’s methods have an open system that integrates innovation into routine business practices: strategy, finance, organizational development, etc. It connects all the dots, across all the boundaries and organizational levels, to create an integrated solution with an adjustable and customizable approach to meet the specific needs of any team charged with making innovation happen.

Making Stone Soup addresses the biggest trend in business today: collaborative innovation. Related trends include crowd sourcing, enterprise innovation, idea markets, innovation jams and tournaments, and open source innovation. Dr. DeGraff’s tools and techniques for jumpstarting collaborative innovation are among the most widely used in the world today. Making Stone Soup is based on Dr. DeGraff’s Innovation Genome framework that is the foundation for the Innovation Genome Index, which is used by dozens of Fortune 500 companies to quantitatively assess their innovation capabilities and predict their growth rates. The Innovation Genome is based on twenty five years of research at the University of Michigan as well as a number of other research universities globally. Dr. DeGraff also operates the Innovatrium Institute for Innovation in Ann Arbor where innovation practices are tested and assessed.

Jeff DeGraff is a professor, author, speaker and advisor to hundreds of the top organizations in the world. Dr. DeGraff has created some of the most widely used innovation methodologies, management and measurement systems. He writes a syndicated column and hosts a public radio program on leading innovation. He is known as the Dean of Innovation because of his influence on the field. To learn more about Jeff and his work on innovation, please visit www.jeffdegraff.com. Connect with him on Twitter @JeffDeGraff.

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