In the past year I have written several chapters that are coming out in two books.  The first is called “Disrupt Together: How Teams Consistently Innovate. This book is based on the work championed at Philadelphia University by Steve Spinelli, created and catalyzed by Heather McGowan (co-authors of the book) to create a new college within the University.  The College of Design, Engineering, and Commerce (DEC) is positioned for creative business people, and differentiates the university from traditional business schools. 

I had the pleasure of being part of the effort as it was being created, and the book uses the experience for how the DEC was created to outline a guide for disruptive innovation. I contributed a chapter on Assessing your Innovation Capacity – a guide to the people and skills required for innovation, and how to fill the gaps.  You can find it here. It also received a nice mention from the VP of Education at Apple:

"Disrupt Together addresses
how teams leverage individual skills to multiply their innovation power. This
book elegantly instructs us how to compete in a world that demands change as a
normative function." 

–John Couch, Vice President
of Education, Apple

The second book is “Global Handbook of Innovation Science”.   As the motivation for this book, the main authors Brett and Praveen have an audacious goal to create standards for innovation education in schools, and have tapped experts to cover a variety of innovation topics.  The book contains 51 chapters contributed by over 50 authors.

For this book I contributed the chapter on Innovation and Neuroscience.  I’m not a neuroscientist, but I am obsessed with figuring out whether or not innovation can be taught or encouraged.  In my career, I’ve learned that it’s not something just anyone can do no matter how much training you may have.  The chapter covers the normal brain processes that facilitate innovative thinking, those that discourage innovative thinking, and insight into how to encourage the former and keep the latter at bay.

I also collaborated with Heather McGowan on a chapter called Inspiration for Innovation which provides a guide for finding people who are inspired to innovate, and provide the right structure, rewards, and environment for their work.  I will provide links to the chapters when they are linked on Amazon.  You can find both books through the links in the sidebar to the left.

I hope you enjoy them, and I'd love to know what you think.  They were fun to write, and working on them really challenged my own thinking, and I've been working in this space for over 15 years!  That's what I love about this field. You can always learn something!