The author''s research has been featured in the
Trade Review
"Creative People Must Be Stopped is among the best books ever written about human imagination in the workplace. David Owens is a master innovator, having practiced his craft as a product designer, researcher, teacher, creativity coach, and executive. The breadth and depth of his experience fills every page of this little gem, which is chock full of hundreds of big and little steps that you can take right now to do more creative work and to lead more innovative teams and organizations."
—Robert Sutton, Stanford Professor, Author of the New York Times bestseller Good Boss, Bad Boss
"This is no rarefied academic treatment on innovation as an abstract ideal, but a nuts and bolts handbook to dissecting our thought patterns about innovation. Owens dispels the myth that innovation is a binary trait that either exists or does not in a given product, process or business model. Creative People Must be Stopped addresses the myriad ways that novel ideas can fail in the marketplace. Working through a combination of thought experiments and real world examples, the book demonstrates how failures in understanding the context for innovation can prove every bit as deadly to progress as failures of imagination."
—Mark Rowan, President, Griffin Technology Inc.
"Dave Owens has delivered the survival guide every would-be innovation team requires before entering the fracas battle of bringing ideas to life. Read '6 Ways We Kill Innovation' if you are serious about making stuff and making stuff happen in this dangerous world for good ideas and the creative people who love them."
—Peter Durand, Alphachimp Studio, Leading expert in graphic facilitation
Table of Contents
Introduction: Creative People Must Be Stopped! 1
1. The Context of Innovation: Why Everyone Wants Innovation but No One Wants to Change 3
2. Why Most of Us Are More Creative Than We Think: Individual Innovation Constraints 25
3. Why a Brainstorm Meeting Can Be Worse Than No Meeting at All: Innovation Constraints in Groups 57
4. Why You’ll Never Be a Prophet in Your Hometown: Organizational Innovation Constraints 95
5. If It’s Such a Great Idea, Why Isn’t Our Competitor Doing It? Industry Innovation Constraints 125
6. Why My Innovation Means You Have to Change: Societal Innovation Constraints 157
7. How to Take a Really Hard Problem and Make It Completely Impossible: Technological Innovation Constraints 187
8. When Failure Is Not an Option: Leading an Innovation Strategy 223
Appendix A: Using the Assessment Results 249
Appendix B: Innovation Team Contract Guidelines 255
Appendix C: An Innovation Bookshelf 259
References 261
Acknowledgments 267
About the Author 271
Index 273
