Innovation Capital: How to Compete--and Win--Like the World’s Most Innovative Leaders

We've all seen leaders who excel at winning resources and support for their ideas. It turns out that this quality is so valuable, and measurably more important for innovation than just being creative, that it has a name: "innovation capital."

Contrary to popular belief, effective leaders of innovation--folks like Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk--are successful not only because of the quality of their ideas but because they have the reputation and networks to successfully commercialize creative ideas. Nikola Tesla was arguably a more brilliant inventor than Thomas Edison, but Edison was able to realize tremendous commercial success while Tesla died penniless.

Innovation Capital reveals the critical ingredient that separates the people who can marshal the resources necessary to turn their ideas into reality from those who can't, and shows you how to acquire, amplify, and use it to succeed as an innovative leader.

Authors Jeff Dyer, Nathan Furr, and Curtis Lefrandt have spent decades studying how people get great ideas (the subject of The Innovator's DNA) and how people test and develop those ideas (explored in The Innovator's Method). Now, they share what they have learned from a multipronged research program designed to understand how people compete for, and obtain, resources to launch innovative new ideas--even, in some cases, before they've earned a track record of innovation. The authors explore questions like:

• What makes someone a good innovation leader?
• How do you win resources in a competitive market?
• How can you build a personal reputation for innovation?
• What techniques can you use to amplify your innovation capital?
• How can you get attention for your ideas and projects and persuade audiences to support them?
• How do you use (or lose) your capital once you have it?

Featuring interviews with the superstars of innovation--individuals such as Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Elon Musk (Tesla), Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com), Indra Nooyi (PepsiCo) and Jeff Weiner (LinkedIn), who made the Top 25 on Forbes first list of the world's most innovative leaders ranked by their innovation capital--this book will help you and your ideas compete for attention, resources, and support--and win.