I’ve worked in various environments driving innovation for the Fortune 100.

Every company is different — different cultures, different complexities, different domains, different strategies. The one thing they had in common was their focus on innovation as a growth engine.

Here’s 5 great books to read if you want to create your own in-house innovation engine:

1: The Corporate Startup: How established companies can create successful innovation ecosystems by Tendayi Viki, Dan Toma, and Esther Gons

If you’ve seen my talk on Leading Innovation, then you know I’m a big fan of this book. It’s the go-to for people that want to build innovation capabilities in large companies. A consistent theme in innovation, it covers how to develop new products for new markets while managing the core business.

“An ambidextrous company needs a senior management team that is comfortable with the paradox of maintaining multiple strategic agendas, using different success criteria for different products and sharing resources between currently profitable cash cow products and future facing products.”

2: Innovation Lab Excellence: Digital Transformation From Within by Richard Turin

This book shows you how to create the conditions and practices necessary for innovation to thrive — even how to measure it.

It goes behind the scenes of working innovation labs to unveil a rigorous set of best practices. The jewel is that this book walks through common problems when building a lab and how to solve them, so you can achieve real results and avoid innovation theater.

“Only when the lab is actively engaged with the business units can it realize full potential.”

3: Disrupt: Think The Unthinkable to Spark Transformation in Your Business by Luke Williams

This book breaks down a detailed approach to identify and execute on disruptive business opportunities. 

It covers everything from ways to lead disruptive thinking, generating hypotheses, defining opportunities, to shaping into solutions and influencing stakeholders to invest in the solution. It has all the things.

“Disruptive change is essential, and sometimes the only way to save what was once the “right model at the time” is to destroy (or at least rethink) it. Nothing is too sacred to be reconsidered. No one way of doing things is beyond improvement.”

4: Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking By Design by Kees Dorst

In this book, Dorst introduces a new approach to problem-solving called frame creation.

It goes deep into the application of design thinking in the ability to create new approaches to the problem situation itself. Dorst provides tools and methods that offer a guide for practitioners to develop their own approaches to problem-solving and creating innovation.

“Professional designers do not focus on the generation of “the idea”: they approach problems in a very strategic, deliberate, and thoughtful way. This approach involves a lot of hard work, where inspirational ideas are helpful but never yield a complete shortcut to a quality solution. Yet the myth of the wonderful, magical, “divine spark” idea that suddenly occurs to the brilliant mind of the incredibly gifted has been quite irresistible to designers, and many of them when interviewed will readily reinforce this image. Unfortunately, it is too good to be true.”