The Heart of Innovation A Field Guide for Navigating to Authentic Demand

Four innovation experts come together and introduce a revolutionary methodology which reveals how to seek out authentic demand for your product, idea, or movement.

Tapping into innovation isn’t easy; in fact, it’s often extraordinarily hard. And when 95% of innovations and new ideas in business, government, and philanthropy fail. It’s important to figure out why. The answer? Customer indifference. Innovators often get stuck convincing themselves they see customers and demand that simply don’t exist.

This book proposes we seek out authentic demand, a kind of demand that doesn’t rely on desire or marketing tricks to make a sale. Instead, it creates a paradigm shift in the marketplace. Suddenly your innovation becomes part of your customer’s daily lives.

The key to finding authentic demand is through what authors Furst, Chanoff, Wegman, and Sabbah call Deliberative Innovation—a practice built around understanding when and how to use three different kinds of innovation: Informative, Transformative, and Formative.

With this book, you’ll have the tools necessary to practice Deliberative Innovation, get yourself unstuck as an innovator, and seek out the authentic demand that lies at the heart of true innovation.

Matt Chanoff is a San Francisco-based angel investor and co-founder with Merrick of the startup studio Flashpoint.  He has served on the boards of early stage companies in logistics and cyber security, and currently sits on eight nonprofit boards in the areas of poverty, media, and education.He has a Master’s of Arts degree in International Economics and Politics from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Dr. Merrick Furst is a Distinguished Professor and the Director of the Center for Deliberate Innovation at Georgia Tech. He founded Flashpoint@GT, a first-of-its-kind startup engineering studio that developed formative leaders and exceptional technology startups. Merrick was the president of the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley, and before that was a professor and dean at Carnegie Mellon.

Mark Wegman is an IBM fellow, IBM’s highest technical honor with more than 100 publications and over 16,000 citations, primarily in algorithms, information theory, compilers and software engineering.  He is also an ACM and IEEE Fellow, a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Distinguished Alumnus of UC Berkeley.

Dr. Daniel Sabbah was the CTO and General Manager, Next Generation Platform, at IBM Corp. He was responsible for creating IBM's Cloud platform and aligning IBM's direction for Cloud and Mobility. He holds an MA and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Rochester and and MBA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.