This Summer, Go First Principle - 16 Innovation Books for Your Reading List (Part 2/2) + Bonus
Part 2 of 2: a practical selection to help you apply, test, and deliver innovation with clarity. You will find some bonus titles at the end.
Welcome back to the second half of this curated summer reading series. In Part 1, we explored the foundational frameworks of innovation: value creation, customer insight, growth strategy, and adoption curves. Now, it’s time to turn the page and dive into the tools, behaviors, and models that turn good ideas into real-world impact.
This selection of 8 books shifts from theory to practice: how to design for the user, experiment with discipline, build ventures inside complex organizations, and scale beyond early traction. If Part 1 sharpened your thinking, Part 2 is here to strengthen your execution muscle.
As always, each book includes a quick breakdown of 🧠 What you’ll learn and 💡 Why it matters, so you can focus your reading where it counts.
Before you dive in
Below you’ll find links to each book. These are affiliate links: if you decide to purchase a title through one of them, it won’t cost you anything extra, but it will indirectly support this project and help me continue sharing insights on innovation and venturing. Thank you for the support, and happy reading!
9. Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators – Vijay Govindarajan & Chris Trimble
👉🏻 Amazon Link
Launching a new venture inside an established company is a delicate act, and Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators is a candid guide from two experts who studied why these corporate ventures often struggle.
🧠 What you’ll learn: Govindarajan and Trimble identify that companies must forget, borrow, and learn to succeed with strategic innovations . “Forget” means shedding the assumptions and processes that made the core business successful (because they can hinder the new venture). “Borrow” means leveraging the company’s unique assets – like brand, distribution, or know-how – to power the new initiative. “Learn” is about embracing that a new venture faces unknowns and must iterate its strategy through disciplined experiments.
💡Why it matters: For innovation leaders in large organizations, this book is a treasure trove of insight on overcoming the corporate immune system. It acknowledges the paradox you face: you have to nurture something radically new while still connected to a big, established company. The “ten rules” serve as guiding principles to navigate this, helping you avoid common pitfalls (like keeping a disruptive venture too close to the core, or too far away).
10. The Innovator’s DNA – Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen & Clayton M. Christensen
👉🏻 Amazon Link
What do the most innovative leaders do differently? The Innovator’s DNA breaks down innovation into tangible behaviors, showing that creativity isn’t just an innate talent, it’s something you can cultivate.
🧠 What you’ll learn: The authors pinpoint five key discovery skills that drive innovative thinking: Questioning, Observing, Networking, Experimenting, and Associating . Through engaging stories and research (including interviews with founders like Jeff Bezos and creative executives at companies like P&G), they demonstrate how each skill contributes to generating new ideas. For example, you’ll read how asking provocative “what if” questions or carefully observing customers in their natural habitat can lead to insights.
💡Why it matters: As an innovation professional, it’s not just your processes or strategies that matter, it’s your mindset and habits. The Innovator’s DNA reminds us that by consciously adopting these five behaviors, leaders can significantly increase their team’s (and their own) creative output. It’s empowering to realize innovation can be learned and taught. In short, this book provides a personal and organizational roadmap to building creative capacity, grounded in what actually works for the best innovators.
11. Blue Ocean Strategy – W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne
👉🏻 Amazon Link
Blue Ocean Strategy has become almost synonymous with finding untapped market space, and for good reason. This book challenges you to stop competing head-on (in bloody “red oceans”) and instead reinvent the game in your favor.
🧠 What you’ll learn: Kim and Mauborgne provide a framework for systematically creating “blue oceans”: new markets ripe for growth, where you have the waters to yourself. You’ll learn tools like the Strategy Canvas to map the current competitive landscape and the Four Actions Framework (eliminate-reduce-raise-create) to reconstruct customer value elements in your industry . The book is rich with examples, from Cirque du Soleil to Nintendo Wii, showing how companies achieved high differentiation and low cost simultaneously to make competitors irrelevant.
💡Why it matters: For strategy and innovation leaders, Blue Ocean Strategy is a reminder that breakthrough growth often comes not from beating rivals, but from creating new demand. It gives you a process to think differently about who your customers could be, what they really value, and how you could deliver that in a novel way. In corporate venturing terms, it helps pinpoint opportunities for new business models or markets that the competition isn’t even looking at. At a personal level, it’s also a mindset shift: encouraging you to question industry assumptions and envision bold moves.
12. Discovery Driven Growth – Rita Gunther McGrath & Ian C. MacMillan
👉🏻 Amazon Link
When pursuing new ventures, the traditional planning approach (with rosy forecasts and rigid plans) often leads to nasty surprises. Discovery Driven Growth offers a smarter way to plan for highly uncertain initiatives, one that actually embraces learning and setbacks as part of the process.
🧠 What you’ll learn: McGrath and MacMillan introduce “discovery-driven planning,” a technique where you start by defining the desired outcomes and then work backward, identifying the assumptions that must prove true for the venture to succeed. Crucially, you treat those assumptions as hypotheses to test. The book guides you to create reverse financials, checkpoint charts, and learning plans so that at each milestone, you either validate assumptions or revise course. Essentially, it’s like having a series of smaller experiments rather than one giant bet. You’ll also learn how to create the right metrics and culture (one that rewards learning) to support this approach.
💡Why it matters: For innovation executives, especially in corporate settings, this approach is a lifesaver. It allows you to go after ambitious, transformational growth but in a controlled, evidence-based way. Instead of pouring millions into a project and praying, you continually check if you’re on the right track. If the data says an assumption is not holding, you adapt or even stop the project: failing fast and cheap rather than late and expensively. This methodology reduces risk while encouraging big thinking. In practice, it can help you convince stakeholders to back bold ideas because you can show a clear learning plan and kill criteria. Discovery Driven Growth essentially gives you the confidence to explore new opportunities by making uncertainty manageable and progress measurable, a critical capability in today’s fast-changing markets.
13. Crossing the Chasm – Geoffrey A. Moore
👉🏻 Amazon Link
Every tech innovator knows the hardest part of innovation isn’t building the product – it’s getting the market adoption. Crossing the Chasm zeroes in on this challenge, mapping out how to convert early product enthusiasm into mainstream market success.
🧠 What you’ll learn: Moore expands on the Diffusion of Innovations curve and highlights the treacherous “chasm” between the early adopters and the early majority . Early adopters (visionaries) are willing to try a new technology product that’s half-baked, but the early majority (pragmatists) want solutions that are reliable and proven – and there’s a big gap in expectations there. The book teaches you strategies to bridge this gap, such as targeting a very specific niche market (a beachhead) where you can dominate and then using that base to expand. Moore emphasizes crafting a whole product solution for that niche (everything needed for the pragmatist customer to feel secure), positioning against the real alternative (often not another tech, but the option of doing nothing), and tailoring your marketing channels and messaging to build credibility with the skeptical majority .
💡Why it matters: If you’re a startup founder or introducing an innovative product as a corporate venture, Crossing the Chasm provides a roadmap for that precarious phase when initial excitement needs to turn into sustainable growth. Many innovations fail here – they get some traction and press, but can’t “cross over” to mainstream profitability. Moore’s advice is practical and battle-tested (the book has been updated over 30 years for a reason). It helps you avoid the mistake of trying to go broad too soon. By reading this, you’ll be equipped to make savvy decisions like choosing the right early market segment, locking in reference customers, and building momentum in a way that carries you over the chasm.
14. Open Innovation – Henry Chesbrough
👉🏻 Amazon Link
The days of relying only on internal R&D for breakthroughs are gone. Open Innovation by Henry Chesbrough is the book that coined the term and concept that has reshaped corporate innovation strategy in the 21st century.
🧠 What you’ll learn: The book lays out the open innovation paradigm: companies can and should use external ideas alongside internal ones, and find both internal and external paths to market for their innovations . You’ll learn why tapping into external knowledge (through partnerships, acquisitions, licensing, startup accelerators, university collaborations, etc.) can dramatically improve your innovation hit rate and speed. Likewise, Chesbrough discusses how projects or intellectual property that don’t fit your strategy might have value elsewhere – leading to spin-offs or licensing deals (outbound open innovation) that create new revenue instead of just shelving the IP.
💡Why it matters: For corporate venturing leaders and innovation executives, Open Innovation is like a manifesto for competing in a world of distributed knowledge. It validates the idea that “not all the smart people work for us” – and shows how to build a strategy around that fact. Embracing open innovation can mean lower R&D costs, faster time-to-market, and access to a broader range of business models (think monetizing tech via licensing where it doesn’t fit your core business).
15. Change by Design – Tim Brown
👉🏻 Amazon Link
Innovation isn’t only about spreadsheets and labs – it’s also about understanding people deeply and fostering creativity. In Change by Design, Tim Brown (CEO of famed design firm IDEO) invites you to experience how design thinking can transform the way you solve problems and develop new ideas.
🧠 What you’ll learn: This book demystifies design thinking as a repeatable, human-centered process for innovation . You’ll follow the journey through stages like empathizing with users (e.g. observing and listening to understand latent needs), ideating with diverse teams (brainstorming lots of wild ideas), prototyping early and often (building rough drafts to test concepts), and iterating based on feedback. Brown shares stories from IDEO’s work (from redesigning a shopping cart in a famous 5-day challenge to working on social sector projects) to show these principles in action.
💡Why it matters: For innovation and strategy professionals, Change by Design is a reminder that at the heart of every innovation is a human being: the customer, the user, the employee. Applying design thinking ensures that we’re solving the right problems (the ones that matter to people) in creative ways. It’s especially useful if your organization is trapped in analytical thinking or “business as usual” approaches; design thinking can unlock fresh solutions to wicked problems by reframing them from the user’s perspective. Moreover, this approach can be applied beyond product design to processes, customer experiences, even strategy design. Tim Brown’s personal, example-rich writing makes it feel like a conversation with a mentor. By the end, you’ll be eager to infuse your innovation process with empathy, playfulness, and experimentation, and you’ll have practical ideas on how to do it, whether you’re leading a workshop or rethinking your company’s service model.
16. The Lean Startup – Eric Ries
👉🏻 Amazon Link
Finally, we end with a modern classic that has become virtually required reading for entrepreneurs and corporate innovators alike: The Lean Startup. Eric Ries’ book flipped traditional business planning on its head and gave us a new lexicon for building ventures under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
🧠 What you’ll learn: The Lean Startup method is all about rapid, iterative experimentation. Ries introduces the Build-Measure-Learn loop as the core of a startup’s activity. You’ll learn to start with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) – the simplest version of your idea that can test a critical hypothesis. Then you measure real customer responses (are they using it? paying for it? coming back?) and learn whether to persevere (double down on what’s working) or pivot (change some aspect of the product or business model that isn’t working).
💡Why it matters: The Lean Startup has revolutionized how we approach launching new products – it’s the playbook for moving fast without breaking your bank (or your business). For startup founders, it offers a way to find product-market fit more efficiently by learning directly from customers, rather than executing rigid business plans based on assumptions. For corporate innovators, adopting lean startup principles can inject much-needed agility and customer focus into big organizations (many large firms now run internal incubators using these ideas). The reason this book resonates across the board is its promise: you can systematically eliminate uncertainty through disciplined experiments.
🎁 Bonus Titles
Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the race that will change the world
Catalyst: How to change anyone’s mind
Getting to Plan B: Breaking through to a better Business Model
The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge
Non-Bullshit Innovation: 17 Proven Ways to Transform How You Work
The Venture Mindset: How to Make Smarter Bets and Achieve Extraordinary Growth
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