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Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs By Larry Keeley, Ryan Pinkel, Brian Quinn, and Helen Walters (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2013)The premise of Ten Types of Innovation can be stated simply: the more types of innovation a company integrates into an innovation, the more successful that innovation will be. The authors provide empirical evidence for this assertion, in the form of case studies and quantitative analyses that demonstrate that break- through innovation is characterized not by good execution of a brilliant idea but by the simultaneous exercise of several of the levers of business design. In a compelling graph charting the stock performance of companies over time, the authors show that performance is consistently higher for companies that are able to incorporate more types of in- novation into their offerings.The 10 types of innovation referenced in the book's title fall along a contin- uum, illustrated as a colored band, roughly organized from the customer experience on the right to the internal guts of the business on the left. This continuum is analogous in many ways to the innovation canvas popularized by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pig- neur in their 2010 book, Business Model Generation, though its use preceded the introduction of the canvas analogy by many years. The authors use the continuum idea, and a simplified rep- resentation of it, throughout the book to categorize tactics and approaches and discuss strategies.A strength of the book is its empiri- cal basis. The authors studied a host of great innovations in an attempt to dis- cern what they had in common. Their analysis includes several familiar cases, from amazon to Zara, including the col- lection of innovations that created the powerful Ford Motor Company and the set of practices behind Procter & Gamble's highly productive Connect + Develop program. The cases make clear the power of an integrated business ap- proach to innovation. The cases also help to clarify the abstractions in the model. Although I did not always agree with the bucketing of a business attri- bute to a particular innovation type, I did find the cases important in devel- oping an understanding of the basic concept.One of the book's weaknesses is its reductionist flavor. It emphasizes mix and match approaches over coherence and at times seems to value racking up innovation types over creating an inte- grated model. Thus, there are 10 types and 100 tactics (which I would refer to as business design elements), and read- ers are encouraged to learn them and play around with them. Doing so will certainly open people's minds about the possibilities-I am sure that many of them are not always considered when businesses make their innovation plans- but it glosses over the hard problem: even great brainstorming is unlikely to equal the power of a truly coherent business model driven by an overarch- ing vision. …