Creative Strategy

William Duggan is senior lecturer in business at Columbia Business School, where he teaches creative strategy in graduate and executive courses. He has given talks and workshops on creative strategy to thousands of executives from companies in countries around the world. His most recent book, Strategic Intuition, was named Best Strategy Book of 2007 by Strategy + Business.

William Duggans 2007 book, Strategic Intuition, showed how innovation really happens in business and other fields and how that matches with what modern neuroscience tells us about how creative ideas form in the human mind. In his new book, Creative Strategy, Duggan offers a step-by-step guide to help you and your company put that same method to work for your own innovations. Duggan shows how creative strategy follows the natural three-step method of your own brain: it breaks down a problem into parts, and then searches for past examples in your memory to come up with a new combination to solve the problem. Thats how innovation really happens. He explains how to follow these three steps to innovate in business or any other field as an individual, a team, or a whole company. The crucial middle step - a search for past examples - takes you beyond your own brain to a what-works scan of what others have done within and outside of your company, industry, and country. It is a global search for good ideas to combine as a new innovation.

Bill Duggan tackles the toughest part of the strategy process, the piece you can't find elsewhere: creating the new innovations that power and revitalize great organizations. For everyone who wants to make an impact, for those who want to lead, for those charged with making organizations work, you won't find this material anywhere else. If you read just one business book this year, make it this one--because this one has a process you can apply immediately in your own organization. -- James E. Schrager, University of Chicago Booth School of Business There is a crisis in corporate innovation. Every company wants more of it, but few companies are happy with what they're getting. The answer? Stop brainstorming, stop ideating, no more two-day offsites: instead, read and use this book. -- Ken Favaro, senior partner, Booz & Company Bill Duggan has done it again. In Creative Strategy he has focused on 'what works' in generating innovation, the key to business prosperity and rising national living standards. By blending analysis and creativity--and insights from psychology and neuroscience--Duggan offers a formal method for generating innovation. Creative strategy will join the big ideas that have framed the study of management in the past generation. This well-written and interesting book is a 'must read' for executives and strategy thinkers. -- Glenn Hubbard, Dean and Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics, Columbia Business School Books on strategy and innovation tend to be of two types. Either they present theories and models that are hard to put into practice or they offer accounts of success stories that are easy to admire but nearly impossible to replicate. This book is different. It is replete with fascinating examples of things that worked, yet the examples are accompanied by clear, practical explanations of why they worked and, more important, how readers can apply the underlying principles and techniques in their own settings. -- Steve Kerr, provost, Chancellor University, and senior advisor and former chief learning officer, Goldman Sachs and General Electric

Part I: Creative Strategy from the Inside1. From Mind to Method2. Precedents3. What's the Problem?4. Where Do We Look?5. Creative Combination6. Resolution7. Get Organized8. Kinds of InnovationPart II: Creative Strategy from the Outside9. Brainstorming10. Top Ten11. Creative12. StrategyPart III: ReferencesCreative Strategy at a GlanceSourcesAcknowledgmentsBibliographyIndex