Tension

The Energy of Innovation

By: Chris Wasden, Mitch Wasden

Narrated by: Chris Lyle Wasden

Rediscover and liberate your creative genius.

The challenge facing today's business leaders is how to transform the tension between running the businesses of today and innovating to build the businesses of tomorrow - how to change and innovate while dealing with the relentless and rapid changes buffeting us daily.

Tension: The Energy of Innovation teaches you how to ride the innovation cycle and lifecycle to discover brilliant ideas and drive those ideas forward through all four phases of innovation development to achieve large scale success.

Harnessing tension accelerates innovation and fuels your creative genius.

Becoming an innovator is analogous to biking - we need to ride a different bike depending on the terrain, and we need a different approach during each phase of the innovation lifecycle. Learn how to manage and excel during the Discovery phase, the Incubation phase, the Acceleration phase, and finally the Scaling phase.

In the Discovery phase, we ride rugged mountain bikes built to survive the risks we face as we explore challenging and unknown terrain.

In the Incubation phase, we need a hybrid bike that can handle both mountain trails and roads, so a potentially innovative idea can be incubated to create a prototype and complete a pilot.

In the Acceleration phase, we innovate the business model to ensure commercial success. This requires a road bike - aerodynamic, light and fast to allow you to quickly pass competitors.

The final phase is Scaling, where we apply Lean Six Sigma practices to scale the business and ensure profits, returning full circle back to the stationary bike.

©2015 Scipio Press LLC (P)2016 Scipio Press LLC

Brilliant practical guide to nurturing innovation at the personal and system levels.

This is a really brilliant book on how people—and businesses can innovate. It begins with a compelling, data driven argument that we are all innovators but that social structures that prioritize convergent thinking crush this.
The authors then provide a compelling metaphor-based explanations for the stages of the innovation cycle - and example and provide evidence and case studies to support their thesis regarding the innovation lifecycle. And by rethinking the definition of innovation to be “value-creating novelty” the authors make innovation accessible, and they debunk several key and popularly held myths about innovation

I found this book to be eye opening on how and why innovation is crushed and also how to set the conditions to accelerate the “velocity, value and volume” of innovation. I’ve read many books on mindful leadership and mindfulness and creativity, but this is the first to set a clear framework for how to practically navigate the inherent tension between mindful and mindless approaches. I recommend this book to anyone who is looking to accelerate innovation for themselves or for the business.