In their fascinating book, INsourcing Innovation, authors David Silverstein, Neil DeCarlo and Michael Slocum point out that innovation is practiced in many companies today by a small, select group of highly educated people. For innovation to become more structured and repeatable, more people need to be trained in the processes and methodologies of innovation.

Stephen Shapiro, author of the excellent book, 24/7 Innovation, has just published his latest work: Goal-Free Living: How to Have the Life You Want NOW!

In this age of outsourcing and partnering, the leaders of many companies have been asking themselves, "Should we outsource our innovation?" According to Tony Davila, Marc Epstein and Robert Shelton, writing in their excellent book, Making Innovation Work, that's the wrong question.

In their great new book, Making Innovation Work: How to Manage It, Measure It and Profit From It, co-authors Tony Davila, Marc Epstein and Robert Shelton outline an innovation framework that is based on a portfolio model. Like a personal investment portfolio, in which you mitigate risk and increase ROI through a combination of conservative, middle ground and aggressive investments, they believe that organizations need to focus not only on breakthrough innovations, but also incremental ones.

In his excellent brainstorming book, Five Star Mind, author Tom Wujec includes a page on the benefits of thinking aloud. Many of us are deeply scripted in the mindset of the lone entrepreneur, dreaming up breakthrough ideas. But the fact is that having a conversation with someone else is a terrific way to bring new thoughts to life.

Jerry Wind and Colin Crook, in their book, The Power of Impossible Thinking, make a strong case for the power of mental models in our personal and business lives. According to the authors, your mental models can either limit you or can spur you to feats of seemingly impossible thinking. But how do you know if it's time to rethink your mental model? Wind and Crook provide these valuable tips that can help you to decide when to abandon your current mental model.

Dave Pollard, author of the How to Save the World Weblog, recently added a post with his thoughts on The Medici Effect, the compelling new book by Frans Johansson. Here is what Dave found to be the book's key message...

In his excellent book, The Medici Effect, author Frans Johansson suggests that the defining characteristic of successful innovators is that they produce and realize an incredible number of ideas.

I'm currently reading Frans Johansson's excellent book, The Medici Effect. It offers some great insights into the changing nature of innovation in our increasingly global, interconnected business world. While doing some online research, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the author operates a Weblog entitled Stories From the Intersection.

The Center for Simplified Strategic Planning recently published a new book called Elements of Innovation, a collection of articles written by its consultants on how to achieve innovation in mid-sized and smaller companies. Here is how CSSP's Web site describes the focus of this new resource.

In his new book, The Medici Effect, author Frans Johansson points out that, although our minds tend to work by association, they also tend to follow the simplest path -- past associations that usually aren't very creative.

Last week, I posted an excerpt from the excellent new book, The Power of Impossible Thinking, which listed eight practices for impossible thinking. Hal Macomber, author of the Reforming Project Management Weblog, really loves this book, and has posted his own thoughts on how changing one's mental model is an effective route to high-performance project management.

A new book from Wharton School Publishing, The Power of Impossible Thinking by Jerry Wind and Colin Crook prompts you to rethink your mental models and transform them to help you achieve new levels of creativity. In this book, the authors give a set of guidelines on how to see differently.

Making creative connections with other people is a powerful avenue to personal creativity, according to Jordan Ayan, in his excellent book, A-ha! 10 Ways to Free Your Creative Spirit and Find Your Great Ideas.

In Alan Robinson's and Dean Schroeder's excellent book, Ideas Are Free, the authors provide a straightforward strategy for making ideas part of every employee's work.

Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder, co-authors of the new book, Ideas Are Free, are big believers in the power of small ideas. To help organizations unlock the potential that could be contained in even the tiniest of ideas, the authors suggest that managers get into the habit of asking themselves these questions.

For many executives, it seems to make intuitive sense: If you reward employees financially for contributing their ideas, they will contribute more of them, right? Not in many cases, according to Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder, authors of the new book, Ideas Are Free. They devote an entire chapter to this topic, the first time I have seen it covered in a book on innovation. Here are some of the ways that idea reward systems can go wrong, according to the authors.

Seth Godin's new book, Free Prize Inside, is focused on helping you to uncover clever, insightful ideas that they you can use to make your product, service or organization remarkable -- a Purple Dow, in Godin's parlance. Here's an excerpt from his condensed summary of the book, which explains why these soft innovations are like a free prize to your company.