Creative Strategy

A groundbreaking guide to how innovation really happens.

William Duggan's 2007 book, Strategic Intuition, showed how innovation really happens in business and other fields and how that matches with what modern neuroscience tells us about how creative ideas form in the human mind. In his new book, Creative Strategy, Duggan offers a step-by-step guide to help you and your company put that same method to work for your own innovations.

Duggan's book solves the most important problem of how innovation actually happens. Other methods of creativity, strategy, and innovation explain how to research and analyze a situation, but they don't tell you how to take the next step: a creative idea for what to do. Or they rely on the magic of "brainstorming"-you toss out ideas off the top of your head. Instead, Duggan shows how creative strategy follows the natural three-step method of your own brain: it breaks down a problem into parts, and then searches for past examples in your memory to come up with a new combination to solve the problem. That's how innovation really happens.

Duggan explains how to follow these three steps to innovate in business or any other field as an individual, a team, or a whole company. The crucial middle step-a search for past examples-takes you beyond your own brain to a "what-works scan" of what others have done within and outside of your company, industry, and country. It is a global search for good ideas to combine as a new innovation. Duggan illustrates creative strategy with real-world cases of innovation that use the same method: from Netflix to Edison, and from Google to Henry Ford. He also shows how to integrate creative strategy into other methods one might currently use, such as Porter's Five Forces or Design Thinking. Creative Strategy takes the mystery out of innovation and puts it within your grasp.

William Duggan is senior lecturer in business at Columbia Business School, where he teaches creative strategy in graduate and executive courses. He has given talks and workshops on creative strategy to thousands of executives from companies in countries around the world. His most recent book, Strategic Intuition, was named Best Strategy Book of 2007 by Strategy + Business.