Creative Strategy: A Guide for Innovation (Columbia Business School Publishing)
Columbia Business School lecturer Duggan's follow-up to his 2007 book, Strategic Intuition, is a practical guide to a  big idea about innovation,  aimed at individuals working by themselves, on teams, or in the context of a whole organization. The real difficulty with innovation is not the execution, but coming up with great ideas in the first place. Duggan uses the neuroscience of innovation to describe the brain's  learning-and-memory  process of analysis to come up with the best new ideas, and to break down the process step by step—applying the strategic intuition of the previous book in a systematic way to solve problems. The process is broken into three stages: problem identification; the  what-works scan,  a survey of how others have solved the same problem; and  creative combination,  which analyzes that process to arrive at a solution. Duggan politely but determinedly critiques the management tools selected by Bain & Co. for its annually compiled top 10 list, describing the pros and cons of various methods and why his is superior. A slim but persuasive guide to innovative thinking. Agent: Michael Bourret, Dystel & Goderich Literary Management. (Dec.)