Innovating with Impact

Ladd, an entrepreneurship professor at Hult International Business School, and Lanteri (Clever), a strategy professor at ESCP Business School, deliver solid advice on entrepreneurship. For inspiration on how to improve one’s business, the authors recommend the four tiers of their “Innovation Pyramid”: mindset, methods, themes, and impact. The “innovator’s mindset,” Ladd and Lanteri contend, embraces taking risks, acting competitively, and being confident, independent, and open to feedback. A five-step process for coming up with original ideas suggests that readers determine the concerns of prospective customers, define what they will seek to gain from one’s product or service, brainstorm ideas on how to provide that, develop prototypes, and then test the product on customers. The authors highlight “themes” that many contemporary innovations share, and explain that, for example, Nespresso’s decision to sell low-cost coffee machines that use single-use coffee pods with high profit margins is representative of the “innovative pricing” trend. The recommendations are useful and smart, even if Ladd and Lanteri’s fondness for diagrams, frameworks, and self-tests has the dubious benefit of making the straightforward advice appear abstruse (a graph of the “three horizons framework” overcomplicates the insight that businesses must expand as they age). Still, this eye-opening manual has its fair share of worthy ideas. (Mar.)