🟢 Why most innovation books suck

Every innovation book I’ve read over the past twenty years has been excellent at solving key pain points for its readers. Whether you’re a freshly minted executive in charge of developing an innovation program or a senior exec who’s been pretending for decades to know what you’re talking about, your pain points tend to progress as follows:

1. The initial, overwhelming stress of understanding what “innovation” means and what can be done about it.
2. Realizing that if every innovation initiative so far has failed miserably, you now need to rapidly find a new approach branded as “this time it works.”
3. Searching for a step-by-step copy-and-paste process guarantees the required success.
4. Figuring out how to explain your plan in five minutes (or less) to top management.

Market efficiency dictates that if this is what readers want, this is what they get. As a result, these books all strive to sell a process that answers the four pain points above.

Does it fit into a pipeline?

Innovation often has to be reduced to something with clear boundaries. Understanding what innovation truly entails is hard and tends to feel too open-ended. Conflating it with technology or R&D simplifies the concept. After all, you can benchmark patents and scientific progress—concrete, measurable outcomes that feel “pipeline-able.”

This approach misses most of what innovation really is, reducing it to mere invention. But if you keep your head down, maybe no one will notice. In a perfect world? We would define innovation as the capacity to transform markets or behaviors, not just invent new tools or processes. Focus on outcomes, not inputs.