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How to Win the Business Game Through Creative Destruction

The world is changing at an unprecedented rate, entire industries are disappearing or evolving, and the planet itself is facing life-threatening challenges on the grandest scale. Change is happening, whether we like it or not.

Even if your company is doing well today, how can you prepare for sudden shifts and unimaginable risks on the road ahead? How can you plan so that you don’t just manage change, but also drive transformation—and sustainable, future-proof growth?

Magnus Penker, serial entrepreneur and Sweden’s “Most Innovative CEO” has the answers. Magnus has worked with companies across the world, from entrepreneurial scale-ups and unicorns, to Global 500’s, to help them reinvent their value propositions, optimize their operations, and scale-up winning ideas. Along the way, he has seen a few disasters as well, which serve as cautionary tales,

Here are a host of stories from a life of frontlines of business rescue, including his analysis of famous business disasters and personal experiences in saving companies on the verge of collapse. With his one-of-a-kind mix of humor, science and practical insights, Magnus Penker explains how to make continuous innovation work in the real world – and how to play bold to win the game.

Wow! Everything that Magnus says is somewhat contrary to our official positions on successful innovation.  I had to read his book.  I am glad that I have.  His book has a freshness of ideas and a wonderful style of writing and content. Magnus has written previous books on innovation in a more formal style.  But this book amounts to sitting down and listening about the logical and emotional work that goes into successful innovation.

– Philip Kotler, Dec 2020

The Complete Guide to Business Innovation (5 Volumes)

Volume 1 – published

How to Assess and Measure Business Innovation

Foreword by Leif Edvinsson, the World´s First Professor Emeritus on Intellectual Capital recognized as Brain of the Year in 1998

Assessing and Measuring Innovation is part one in a 5-volume series investigating why some innovations have proven to be exponentially influential and identifying which elements matter most in transforming brilliant ideas into practical ones. Based on hard data from thousands of enterprises and penetrating insights from professional innovation consultants, this volume guides business leaders through a critical selfassessment prior to the launch of any innovative project. The InnoSurvey® introduced in this series represents the world’s largest database on business innovation.

Over the past two decades, Innovation360 founder Magnus Penker has counseled countless enterprises on making innovation profitable, executing digitization and the global implications of new business models. He was recognized as “CEO of the Year” in 2016 for his achievements in Innovation and Growth Strategies. While devoting time to helping others, he successfully launched 10 startups and turned around more than 30 businesses throughout the continent of Europe.

Innovation360’s mission is to support and strengthen the global innovation capability needed to address humanity’s grand challenges: Food, Energy, Water, Security, Global Health, Education, Environment, Poverty and Space; something we share with all our licensed practitioners as well as strive for internally. The aim is, therefore, to help 1 million+ entrepreneurs, companies, executives and scientists to become world-class innovators through our unique innovation measurement tool and database, InnoSurvey®, as a free-to-all digital online service. This is complemented by an enterprise tool and specialist services provided by our consultants, as well as licensed practitioners all over the globe.

The beauty is that the more we do, the more our licensed practitioners do and the more value we provide while earning profits at the same time. This allows us to invest even more in evidence-based innovation management and help millions of entrepreneurs to make the world a better place as they use sustainable innovation solutions to solve the grand challenges facing humanity.

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Reviews on Book #1

Impressive guide to the practice of Innovation validated by the largest innovation survey ever conducted
By Richard on August 22. 2017
Format: Paperback

I have been lucky to have access to the final draft of this book and have read it cover to cover, if you are a CEO, a CIO. An Innovation Director or someone who has just ‘got the job’ of managing the innovation portfolio then this is the series for you. Magnus, Sten and Peter have embarked on a full review of the available research around Innovation and have formulated this amazing book series. Volume 1: “How to Assess and Measure Business Innovation” covers far more than their business perspective. This is an evidenced work of impressive scope packed into a very readable format. This will become your well thumbed reference guide to Innovation and will be my constant companion until volume two comes out! Buy it and take control of your innovation portfolio.

Very useful for assessing innovation in a business region As the …
By Claes on August 29, 2017
Format: Paperback

As the head of a business region in Sweden, I have had the privileged to work with the presented methodology running large scale assignments involving over 20 local companies to align strategy with capability driving for innovation and export all over the world. The book explains the concept of assessing and measuring innovation for businesses and regional development in a very clear way and l can recommend it to any executive, entrepreneur or business regional developer for growing their markets. Also looking forward to the coming four volumes in the book series.

If you like to challenge your entrepreneur-ship this is the book
By Niclas Carlsson on August 26, 2017
Format: Paperback

I am driving one of the largest EU based entrepreneurship associations, Founders Alliance incl. Entrepreneurs World Summit where we have members that worked with the presented methodology with very good results. As entrepreneur it is in your DNA to know best, and you need to be determined, and when Magnus Penker, presented his and Innovation360’s methodology, members stated to use it with extraordinary results. Why, simply because you get confronted with fact and inconvenient truth breaking down paradigms and putting the spotlight on what’s matter most to grow. I a truly recommend this first book in the series “The Complete guide to Business Innovation” if you want to challenge statue que in your organization.

This is a great investment if you want to learn more about how …
By Peter Glasheen – Sydney, AUSTRALIA on August 22, 2017
Format: Paperback

“I have been working with the methodology in this book and it presents the subject in a very tangible and inspiring way, both for Consultants and for Organisations. I firmly believe that assessing innovation is a key action to take and get the right the right measurement in place. It is one of the first steps to becoming a truly innovative organisation and to maintaining a sustainable portfolio over time. This is a great investment if you want to learn more about how to assess what’s maybe the most important capital of them all, the innovation capital of you organization.”

Volume 5 – published

Sustainable Growth and Profits: Managing Your Innovation Strategy, Organization, and Initiatives

Innovative concepts are like living organisms—they require energy and resources to survive. Innovation can only thrive when it emerges from an organization committed to the growth and sustainability of the enterprise. Instead of thinking of cultivating an innovation in isolation, organizations are more successful when they generate a cluster of innovations, manage them side-by-side, and evaluate how they interact as a portfolio of initiatives. Volume 5, the final volume in this detailed reference series, tackles the changing role of strategy, leadership, transformation, sustainability, and how to manage a balanced portfolio of strategic initiatives.

Innovation360 founder Magnus Penker has counseled countless enterprises on making innovation profitable, executing digitization, and responding to the global implications of new business models. While devoting time to helping others, he successfully launched 10 start-ups and turned around more than 30 businesses throughout Europe. Penker and his colleagues bring their collective wisdom and contemporary examples from well-known corporations to this thought-provoking and game-changing approach to innovation.

“In our degree programme, we aim to give leaders the tools and know-how to innovate and transform their companies & industries.  This book is an excellent resource to understand the external influences and internal abilities to do so.”

– Melissa RancourtAcademic Director of Global Executive Master Degree on Strategic Design & Management at Parsons School of Design.

“This book discusses the critical role that people and organization have in making innovation happen. The text is nicely organized, and it aligns well the emerging ISO/CD 50501 standard/guidance for innovation management.”

– John SaizPrincipal Industrial Fellow at the Univ. of Cambridge and former CTO of NASA JSC.

Authors

Magnus Penker is an internationally renowned thought leader on innovation, digitization, and business transformation. He has spoken at prestigious global forums and events including the Global Peter Drucker Forum, top-ranked international business schools, a variety of associations, and some of the world’s largest companies.

He has been honored with two Business Worldwide Magazine awards for his achievements, the “Most Innovative CEO Sweden 2016” and “Growth Strategy CEO of the Year Sweden 2016” awards. Additionally, he has launched ten startups and has acquired, turned around, and sold more than thirty European SMEs.

Through his best-selling American books on digitization and IT engineering, and his more than twenty years of experience as a management consultant and business leader, Mr. Penker inspires leaders to find a new way of thinking and organizing to stay on top.

For the past eight years, he has used his practical and theoretical insights to develop InnoSurvey, a leading methodology and global innovation database that is used for business analysis and support to companies, business leaders, and scientists around the world. Today, Mr. Penker is the CEO and founder of the Innovation360 Group, headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, and New York in the United States.

Mr. Penker is driven by the recognition that in these turbulent times, we must understand our core strengths and determine how we can use those capabilities and competencies to create advantages in a globalized market with endless possibilities. The global map is being redrawn at speeds never before seen, and historically low interest rates are attracting capital to global digital-risk projects that will further strengthen this movement.

Mr. Penker has a BSc in Computer Science (CTH, Sweden) and an MBA from the Henley Business School, England.

Peter Junermark is an acclaimed trainer who has brought his skills to some of the world’s most recognizable brands. As a leader of Innovation360 workshops, Peter specializes in bringing disruptive technology and breakthrough projects to life. He is the senior software architect and lead developer with primary responsibility for the platform supporting the tools of the Innovation360 Group.

Before joining the Innovation360 Group, Peter was cofounder and a senior manager at Open Training Sweden’s Gothenburg office. During his long-term consultancy at the Volvo Information Technology headquarters, Peter built learning-management and competence-management systems.

As one of the initial contributors to the Innovation360 Framework, Peter brings to this series of volumes a deep understanding of the theoretical foundations of his work. Peter’s training background and logically ordered thinking proved to be invaluable in explaining the most complex relationships in plain language with examples that are easy to visualize.

Peter holds a master of science in computer engineering from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. His latest projects involve the investigation of cutting-edge AI that expand on agile methodologies and establish an easily sharable set of coding principles.

Sten Jacobson has successfully managed more than two hundred management-consulting assignments, during which he challenged board members, executive teams, and managers to keep pressing for more creative yet profitable business models, often with sustainability at the core of the differentiation.

He is a master at the practical applications of Blue Ocean strategy creation, which is designed to unearth one-of-a-kind, data-derived pockets of uncontested markets. He shows companies how to redraw industry boundaries in such a way that it essentially makes competition irrelevant.

Sten is the leading instructor for the accreditation of Innovation360’s global cadre of licensed practitioners. He has been instrumental in spreading the InnoSurvey results and methodologies out to every continent. He has engaged within workgroups at the ongoing international standardization work (ISO) on innovation-management systems and innovation-management assessment. Among Sten’s most in-demand skills are his expertise in executive-team mentoring, power conceptualization/visualization, seismic disruption, and the applications of advanced tech within professional services. His speaking engagements for C-level execs and international associations also frequently center on his work in value-proposition design, business-process mapping, and digital transformation.

He brings to this series a wider perspective on strategic execution of Innovation360 principles, translating the mechanics of innovation into management standards and practices that can be put into effect the moment the innovation team is assembled.

Sten holds a master of science in electronic engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. He also holds higher-management education from the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) in Stockholm.

Reviews on Book #5

A practical guide for Innovation Management
By Paulo on March 6, 2018
Format: Paperback

In this book Magnus Penker explains how to link an innovation strategy with the business strategy and the role of leadership in the deployment of Innovation Initiatives that deliver results.
The approach and methodologies described in the book help organizations obtain innovation results across short, medium and long term.
The book ends with a very interesting reflexion regarding the potential of Artificial Intelligence in innovation management.

Understanding the UPACS of the 21st Century
By Femi-stevens on February 16, 2018
Format: Paperback

In a world in desperate need of sustainability and institutional growth and profit, just like the first installment and more, this is a must-read for innovation practitioners and professionals in general. Deeper insight to data-driven and evidence-based assessment and measurement of innovation capabilities for sustainable growth and profit.

Data Driven and Practical Guide to Innovation
By Jonathan Bean on February 18, 2018
Format: Paperback

Excellent book for innovation professionals and execs tasked with any growth challenge. Instead of the lazy thinking and writing on innovation which is usually derived from a few blog posts or books on design thinking and lean startup this book takes a different approach and is based on real world data from innovation projects in companies worldwide.

An excellent read throughout…
By Munir on August 29, 2017
Format: Paperback

An excellent read throughout.. My favorites have been chapter 5 and 8- truly insightful.
Looking forward to the other volumes in the series.

An excellent overview of the strategical landscape of innovation
By Christer Berg on April 4, 2018
Format: Paperback

“An excellent overview of the strategical landscape of innovation. Particularly interesting is the sixth chapter which presents a useful structure for analyzing where to innovate in a given situation. In a sense, Magnus Penker and the Innovation 360 Group has innovated the tools for managing innovation.”

UPCOMING BOOKS

SWEDISH BOOKS

The Innovation Guru on Storytel

Innovation is for everyone. I mean that in two ways. First, no one should think that this is a special talent possessed by only a few lucky individuals. Everyone can learn how to innovate successfully. It’s a science, and not a mad science like alchemy but a good science like chemistry. It takes the right combination of the right elements to innovate successfully, but once those elements are in place the company can replicate the process, over and over. No company can depend on a single great idea for very long. It requires a culture of innovation to win consistently in a rapidly changing market.

At the same time, “innovation is for everyone” means that it belongs to the whole world. Innovation can and must do far more for us than just help a single company become a bit more efficient. Our entire planet needs to think more innovatively if we hope to prevent a catastrophic future.