Innovation for Entrepreneurs

Innovation for Entrepreneurs presents a powerful but easy to apply toolkit for innovation, based on Professors Meyer and Lee's decades of experience as company founders and innovators for corporations around the globe. This textbook includes guidance for developing new product and service ideas with genuine impact, building teams around these ideas, understanding customers’ needs, translating these needs into compelling product and service designs, and creating initial prototypes. It also helps students learn how to scope and size target markets and position an innovation successfully relative to competitors. These methods are fundamental for any new, impactful venture.

The textbook is a series of frameworks and methods that build upon one another to the final deliverable – an innovation project developed by student teams, solving problems for specific types of users and use cases. Each chapter introduces readers to entrepreneurs and their stories of innovation and venture development, across different sectors of the economy and regions of the world. Going to a core theme of the book, each of these entrepreneurs has tackled a societal-focused problem and created economic value for themselves and their investors. These are stories of inspiration and achievement – and they illustrate the major frameworks provided in the book. Each entrepreneur faced a problem or challenge solved by the methods presented in that chapter. The authors’ own entrepreneurial and corporate innovation experiences then complement these examples with additional industry applications of the method. Then, each chapter concludes with exercises for students to apply their newfound knowledge to their innovation projects. The book's final chapter then shows students how to best integrate their work from each chapter into a compelling presentation.

Innovation for Entrepreneurs is an essential book for all undergraduate students. Entrepreneurship students in business schools will find it addressing a missing link in many business school curriculums – how to design a distinctive new product or service. At the same time, the methods-based approach combined with its inspiring stories makes this book a great learning platform for engineering and science students thinking about starting their own ventures or working for others upon graduation. Mindful, purposeful innovation is the gift that we wish to share in this book, arming readers with practical, powerful methods. Our students have started many interesting, impactful companies, and with this, have gained the deeper satisfaction of using creativity and technology to help others.