Have you thought about writing a book about innovation?

It seems like everyone is writing a book about
innovation. There are certainly some
famous authors and specialists (with great experiences from the innovation world) out there who can write books on the topic.

For instance, my fellow blogger Gijs Van Wulfen recently
wrote a great book, 'The Innovation Expedition' that strives to enable business
people with a visual toolkit for starting the innovation process. I think his work can serve as a manual for
the uninitiated. So'he did it.

Writing A Book

I've thought of writing a book on the topic of innovation
as well. I still might. I did write a 33
page white paper aggregating the first year of my blogs back in 2010. You can read it here.
But that's a pretty short book.

It seems I should
be able to amass all the blog entries I've contributed since then into a single
volume and title it 'Achieving Adoption and Engagement Success with a
Collaborative Innovation System Deployment'.
Stand by for that'for the moment I have a day job helping large
organizations acquire licenses to those systems. Plus that title sounds boring even to me.

Collaborating On A Book

Earlier this year, in May, I was asked to participate in
writing a chapter of a new book. The book
is designed to be a textbook for University students in Eastern Europe studying
business and innovation.

Our chapter
focused on

"Managing communication and creative ideation for sustainable
innovation".

Working with an assistant professor (from the University
of Novi Sad, Serbia, covering subjects in business communication) and an
Associate Professor (of Technology Management and Innovation from a university
in Florida), we first responded to a sketch for the paper, then the extended
abstract for submission, and finally the working paper. There is no publication
fee. This is a noncommercial project
that will produce a doctoral conference and a three volume book for engineers
and managers in Eastern Europe.

The
book will be part of the "Engineering Management - Challenges for the
Future" publication.

We first wrote the title with "sustainable innovation" at the end,
trying to accent that 'innovation needs to perpetuate', but realized it could
bring confusion (misleading to environmental-related innovation). "Continuous innovation" was a bad
choice also, as it relates to a specific type of innovation. Also, we want to
concentrate on the creative potentials of both the company employees, the
company external partners and users. Hence the title we selected: "Improving
open innovation: Challenges for managing communication and creative ideation".

Two PhD.'s And A Sales Professional

Working with two academics can
prove intimidating. Their contributions
were heavily footnoted with citations from research.

My work on the other hand is a combination of

Any confidence I have in my method
is supported by the 'TRIZ' theory of innovation which subscribes to the notion
that an innovation useful in one industry should be portable and useful in
another.

It is much easier to write by
yourself. You pick your topic, you
gather your material. You get it on paper using the grammar skills you learned
in school. Hopefully it will be well
written, informative, entertaining and engaging.

Collaborative Writing

Working with two collaborative
writing partners is harder. You have to
take turns. You have to be respectful of
others contributions. Someone has to
take the bull by the horns and make decisions about what goes where (and what
gets left out). By the way, on this
project that person wasn't me.

The process took about three
months. We generated about 18 pages
(almost five of which were those footnoted citations).

Being Proud Of One's Work

I write these blogs thinking the
practices we learn out in the field might prove useful to readers who are administering
collaborative innovation social networks or idea management systems. The book chapter serves the same
purpose'students (readers) should be able to read the material and walk into a
project for idea crowd sourcing armed with a reasonable foundation. They should be able to set goals, outline a
launch plan and manage expectations. So
I think it was a successful endeavor.

What's Next?

So I can claim credit for having
written at least a hundred blogs (on innovation, customer experience management,
enterprise feedback management and voice of the customer). I can also claim credit for writing a lengthy
white paper on innovation. Now I'm a
co-author of a chapter on innovation in a textbook for future business leaders.

Stand by for that book.

Ron Shulkin blogs, researches and writes
about enterprise technology focused on social media, innovation, voice of the
customer, marketing automation and enterprise feedback management. You
can learn more about Ron at his biography web site:www.shulkin.net. You can follow him Twitter. You can follow his blogs at
this Facebook
group. You can connect with Ron on LinkedIn.

Ron Shulkin is Vice President of the Americas
for CogniStreamer', an innovation ecosystem. CogniStreamer serves as a
Knowledge Management System, Idea Management System and Social Network for
Innovation. CogniStreamer has been rated as a 'Leader' in Forrester's recent Wave
report on Innovation Management Tools. You can learn more about CogniStreamer
here http://bit.ly/ac3x60 . Ron also manages
The Idea Management Group on LinkedIn (JoinHere).