The Radical Innovation Playbook: A Practical Guide for Harnessing New, Novel or Game-Changing Breakthroughs



The only guide you will need on creating, planning, and launching a radical innovation project.

Innovation is a must if you want your company to adapt and overcome the market's rapid change in this highly competitive world. Innovation can drive growth and revenue, whatever the size of your business – whether a micro-company, SME, or multinational.

But while the more commonly tried and tested incremental innovation can save time, costs and enable a company to be more sustainable, breakthrough and radical innovation (the creation of new, far-reaching, and novel ideas) can generate between two to five times as much revenue within the same period.

The challenge is that breakthrough and radical innovation are hard: they require unique capabilities, structures, approaches, success metrics, and cultures to succeed. Launching radical projects without a strategic approach risks you burning through time and money without anything to show for it.

The Radical Innovation Playbook is a practical, how-to-do-it manual with tested advice and guidance on planning, creating, and successfully launching new innovative business ideas.

Authors Olga Kokshagina, an innovation practitioner, researcher, and advocate for open science and entrepreneurism and Allen Alexander, an Associate Professor with a focus on innovation and entrepreneurism, provide insight, practical solutions, and reusable business model canvases to show how to develop breakthrough and radical ideas while steering through the culture of the organisation to gain buy-in from peers as well as stakeholders.


In this playbook, you will learn how to:

Discover new innovative ideas and emerging market opportunities;
Find evidence that your innovation idea has business viability;
Make vital decisions about how to plan and design your innovation project;
Generate alternatives to your proposition;
Explore, collect and analyse information to influence and convince others;
Identify, navigate, and embrace uncertainty;
Engage with peers and stakeholders;
Reflect on how your organisation supports ideation processes;
Discover, explore and secure investment;
Gain confidence and skills for a successful launch;
Diversify into new markets and commercial channels;
Build a business structure that enables innovation to grow;
Inspire and support future generations to make an impact and achieve success.

This book is for you if:

You are a first-time innovator looking for guidance and help in understanding how to take your fledgling ideas forward;

A CEO or senior manager looking to invest in and devise your next-generation corporate innovation portfolio;

You need to tailor your organisational structure to explore and deliver successful innovations.


The Radical Innovation Playbook is a practical guide, presented in striking colour, with downloadable worksheets and canvases to help you collect, analyse, plan and launch a successful breakthrough or radical innovation project.



Events around the book

Link to a De Gruyter Online Event in which the authors Olga Kokshagina and Allen Alexander together with John Bessant, University of Exeter Business School, and Carina Leue-Bensch, Lufthansa Systems, talk about their own experiences in creating environments and models for radical innovation:
https://youtu.be/eTLhMi4rBqY