Beyond Eureka!

Book excerpt: "This tour-de-force of the history of the implementation of innovation seeks to address one of the biggest problems faced by entrepreneurs and corporate executives alike: the conflation of entrepreneurship with innovation. They are not the same, and they each come with their own challenges and opportunities. Starting a business is not the same as innovating a new product or service. Many books explain how to pitch, start and scale a company, as well as how to structure engineering, product, sales, marketing, and financial departments. It's implied that the company has a product or a service that has enough differentiators for the organization to succeed in the marketplace and that its founders and teams will thereby automatically be perceived as innovators. People get their understanding of what innovating means from various informal and formal sources, but it's when they get into creating something novel, whether a new product, conceptual breakthrough or business model, that they truly begin to reflect on what they thought they knew. It is then that they often become confused by the conventional wisdom. Silicon Valley pioneer and serial entrepreneur Marylene Delbourg-Delphis answers the most important questions about innovation that she has been asked by other founders and CEOs over the years. Packed with the benefits of hands-on experience, historical knowledge, and conceptual analysis, this book is a critical foundation for innovators, whether entrepreneurs or the strategic leadership teams of established companies, including heads of sales, marketing, operations, and product development"--