Using Thematic Thinking to Achieve Business Success, Growth, and Innovation: Finding Opportunities Where Others Don't Look - Hardcover

Froehlich, Julia Kathi; Hoegl, Martin; Gibbert, Michael

9780133448078: Using Thematic Thinking to Achieve Business Success, Growth, and Innovation: Finding Opportunities Where Others Don't Look

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 013344807X ISBN 13: 9780133448078

Publisher: Pearson FT Press, 2014

Leverage hidden similarities and connections to succeed in new markets and avert emerging business risks! Firmly rooted in the latest cognitive science, Thematic Thinking helps you recognize your great opportunities and grave threats in distant but related industries and markets. If you're an executive, entrepreneur, or strategist, it will help you illuminate blind spots on your strategic maps and innovation processes, by radically redefining what you see as similar to your core business.

Using Thematic Thinking to Achieve Business Success, Growth, and Innovation explains why this approach to innovation works so well, and how to successfully apply it in your business. Using realistic business cases, the authors show:

How Thematic Thinking responds to today's radically shifting business environment, and the collapse of traditional market boundaries
Why traditional approaches to innovation can often be counterproductive, and how to go beyond them
How to systematically uncover deep similarities where most managers only see differences
How to understand these similarities as immense new business opportunities – and uncover emerging risks you wouldn't otherwise notice until too late
How to explore and combine themes, identify similarities, create and evaluate thematic ideas, organize for Thematic Thinking, and overcome obstacles to success

Which Google manager would have imagined people substituting Facebook for Gmail? Which Nike manager recognizes the huge potential competitive threat now presented by Apple? With Thematic Thinking, linkages like this become clear – and innovative, once-hidden strategic options are revealed!

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From the Back Cover:

UNCOVER HIDDEN CONNECTIONS TO SHAPE WINNING BUSINESS STRATEGIES

A breakthrough approach to innovation, based on the latest cognitive science

Go beyond conventional and counterproductive innovation strategies

Illuminate blind spots on your strategic maps and innovation processes

For executives, entrepreneurs, strategists, marketers, and other business leaders

What do jogging shoes and iPods have in common? Will consumers substitute Facebook for Gmail? The way you perceive similarities profoundly shapes your business strategy. And there’s a far better way to do it: thematically.

Thematic Thinking offers a powerful new methodology for categorizing competitors, identifying markets, and choosing partnerships. Using it, you can uncover massive new opportunities and threats others ignore—at their peril.

Packed with business cases and applications, this book will help you integrate Thematic Thinking throughout your decision-making. You’ll learn how to create thematic ideas, evaluate them, organize them, and help them thrive—even in organizations that resist.

Using these techniques, you’ll gain insights no other approach can deliver: insights that lead to more profitable strategy, and more successful innovation.

Executives constantly seek greater innovation in their core businesses. But they routinely overlook great opportunities and grave threats in distant but related industries and markets. As markets change and industries merge, leaders and strategists must radically redefine what they see as similar—and, hence, what is truly related to their core businesses.

Rooted in the latest cognitive psychology, Thematic Thinking offers a powerful new tool for doing this. Using it, you can illuminate dangerous blind spots on your strategic maps, and systematically foster higher-value innovation.

Now, three pioneering Thematic Thinking scholars show how to make the most of this powerful methodology. Using realistic business cases, they help you uncover opportunities and risks hidden in plain sight, and build products and services that transform markets.

Search where others never think to look Go beyond “taxonomic” similarities everyone already notices
Identify fruitful themes, and create great ideas based on them Explore the most promising sources for effective themes and ideas
Transform great thematic ideas into profitable solutions Solve business problems, improve customer retention, and reach new markets
Use Thematic Thinking to innovate more effectively Link technologies, devices, and trends to Thematic Thinking

About the Author:

Julia K. Froehlich conducts research at the Institute for Organization and Human Resource Management at the University of Bern (Bern, Switzerland). She worked at the Institute for Leadership and Organization at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit™t M�nchen (Munich, Germany) and the chair for Leadership and Human Resource Management at the WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management (Koblenz, Germany), and was a visiting researcher at the University of Lugano (Switzerland). She is psychologist by training and devoted her doctoral thesis in management to thematic thinking. Her research focuses on managerial and organizational cognition in the fields of innovation and strategy. Her special interest lies in the idea itself; she is always on the lookout for great new ideas wherever she goes.

Michael Gibbert is professor of marketing at the University of Lugano (Switzerland). He is interested in innovation management and how creative ideas emerge and are turned into successful marketplace strategies. Unless he is in a bad mood, he uses Thematic Thinking every day. His academic work has been published in a variety of journals, including Journal of Product Innovation Management, R&D Management , Industrial Marketing Management , Research Policy , Strategic Management Journal , Organizational Research Methods , and others.

Martin Hoegl is professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit™t M�nchen (Munich, Germany), where he heads the Institute for Leadership and Organization. Before joining LMU Munich, he served on the faculties of Washington State University (USA), Bocconi University (Milan, Italy), and WHU (Vallendar, Germany). His main research interests include leadership, collaboration, and innovation in organizations. Martin Hoegl held visiting professorships at the Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern University, USA) and at the National Sun Yat-Sen University (Taiwan), and has given guest lectures at various international universities. He has been published in the Academy of Management Journal , Journal of International Business Studies , Journal of Management , Journal of Product Innovation Management , MIT Sloan Management Review , Organization Science , and other journals.

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