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Contrary to popular belief, ‘innovation’ is not a free-flowing work of magic that manifests organically. It takes work, structure and strategy. To help our clients and their organisations innovate with lasting impact, we’ve ‘stood on the shoulders of giants’ by drawing on the knowledge of innovation experts. There is also a lot of noise and misinformation when it comes to innovation and it’s hard to filter out what works and what doesn’t. Well, we’ve done the hard work for you. In no particular order, here are our Top 20 Must Read Books on Innovation:

1. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Ries is one of the key people leading the lean startup movement. This is a practical guide about what Lean Startup is and how to do it. We love this for being both theoretically accessible and practical.

2. The Innovator’s Dilemma & The Innovator’s Solution, by Clayton M. Christensen. Brought to you by the Harvard Business Professor who coined the term disruptive innovation. 

The Innovator’s Dilemma explains how even the most outstanding companies can do everything right yet still lose market leadership. The Innovator’s Solution explains how companies can and should become disruptors themselves.

3. The Innovator’s Guide to Growth by Scott D. Anthony, Mark Johnson, Joseph V. Sinfield and Elizabeth J. Altman. In a nod to Christensen’s aforementioned works, these authors show you how to take the practical steps necessary to leverage and benefit from disruption.

4. Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer choice, also by Clayton M. Christensen. In his latest book, Christensen takes his ‘jobs to be done’ theory further by demonstrating its predictive and insightful power.

5. The Curve Ahead: Discovering the Path to Unlimited Growth by Dave Power. Case studies such as LoJack and Myspace are used to tackle questions such as “why do most growth companies stop growing?” and “what can leaders do to overcome the barriers to growth?” Power writes to help SMEs overcome the growth hump by providing tools to succeed and thrive.

6. Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. Weinberg and Mares offer nineteen channels you can use to build a customer base, a well as a three-step framework (called Bullseye) to figure out which ones will work best for your business. It draws on interviews with more than forty successful founders, including Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Alexis Ohanian (reddit), Paul English (Kayak), and Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot). The lessons and examples in Traction will help you create and sustain the growth your business desperately needs.

7. Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works by Ash Maurya. The premise of this book is that products fail due to wasted time, money and effort in building the wrong product. Maurya offers a systematic process for quickly vetting product ideas and raising the odds of success. Check out our podcast with the man himself over here on his follow-up book, Scaling Lean.

8. Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products by Nir Eyal. Hooked provides actionable steps for building products people love and can't put down. The book elaborates on the Hook Model - a four-step process that, when embedded into products, subtly encourages customer behaviour.

9. Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore. In Crossing the Chasm, Moore demonstrates that in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, there is a vast chasm between the early adopters and the early majority. Moore argues that in order to successfully cross the chasm, you must create the “whole product,” position the product appropriately for skeptical pragmatists who make up the early majority, price the product relative to competitive comparisons and distribute the product through the right channels.

10. The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company by Steve Blank. The Startup Owner's Manual walks you, step-by-step, through the tested and proven Customer Development process created by startup expert Steve Blank, unlocking the secrets to building a successful, scalable company. It's the indispensable reference guide for any startup founder, entrepreneur, investor or educator.