innovation – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

Ownership Unlocked: 4 Principles to Build Self-Driven Teams That Take Initiative, Innovate & Win

By Scott J. Pearson | March 10, 2026March 10, 2026 by Scott J. Pearson

Employees’ psychological ownership of their projects is a secret weapon to increase their productivity and effectiveness. Increasing ownership of their projects is a trait I seek to encourage among the software developers I work with. Their ownership not only keeps me from making too many tiny decisions for them, but it also tends to increase the quality of their work. It lets me know that they’re gaining self-confidence and investment in their work towards mastery…

Intellectual Property: A Handbook for Startups

By Scott J. Pearson | June 27, 2024June 27, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

New businesses, especially in technology, are often driven by new inventions. Thus, they require an inordinate amount of attention to intellectual property (IP) issues. However, being a new business, these companies are often the ones least able to afford the advice of an IP expert or a patent attorney. Groups that identify a stated IP strategy are shown to be much more likely to attract investors’ interest. So IP is more about getting a business’…

Leadership Management-Business

Managing Creative People: Lessons in Leadership for the Ideas Economy

By Scott J. Pearson | June 9, 2024September 24, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

As Gordon Torr shares, creativity is a driving force of modern economies and of civilization. While productivity remains important, only innovation can give a company or a society a let up on the other. Unfortunately, few people are highly creative – a trait that requires both talent and nurturing. Managing talent in a way that leads to productive results is its own challenge with its own nuance. Torr shares some thoughts that can advance good…

Management-Business Software-Technology

The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

By Scott J. Pearson | February 4, 2024February 4, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

As technological development has increasingly driven the world economy, many observe that it causes a disruptive economic effect. New technology can humble big players and lift new players to leading positions. These effects often happen despite managers doing all the “right things.” We now have enough data to begin to analyze how technological disruptions happen across many industries. More importantly, we have data about how to manage innovation’s turbulence. In this classic text, Clayton Christensen…

Leadership Management-Business Software-Technology

Fostering Innovation: How to Build an Amazing IT Team

By Scott J. Pearson | August 12, 2022September 24, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

A Chief Information Officer (CIO) is a relatively new addition to a modern business’s C-suite. However, despite being recent, in an era of digital innovation, it’s become an essential one. Instead of offloading work onto employees, most companies try to offload some of the work onto the IT department. IT specialists, the builders of technology, usually cannot meld their products into business-ready deliverables. That’s where the CIO comes in, to lead tech efforts towards a…

Economics Management-Business

The Innovator’s Hypothesis: How Cheap Experiments are Worth More than Good Ideas

By Scott J. Pearson | January 26, 2022January 26, 2022 by Scott J. Pearson

Empiricism and the scientific method have had some positive impact on the practice of business. Most people recognize the market as a great external object of study, yet scientific impact on innovation is usually limited and relegated to the domain of hunches by analytic experts. For their part, business schools tend to crank out expert planners and analysts, but do not expressly delve into experimentation. Schrage thinks that is a mistake and writes this book…

Economics Management-Business Research-Education

Monetizing Innovation

By Scott J. Pearson | June 19, 2021June 19, 2021 by Scott J. Pearson

Research and development (known colloquially as R&D) is an inevitability of capitalist markets. New innovations usually outpace yesterday’s technologies. However, many R&D products fail to transition from development to the marketplace. In this work, Ramanujam and Tacke suggest that many of the failures can be avoided by proper management of pricing prior to the start of the project. In truth, this work is an in-depth look at how to set the price of an innovation.…