Creative People Must Be Stopped Read Online Free PDF Page A

advance the vital factors that determine our chances for success when we embark on an innovation. This is just what the constraints framework is designed to provide.
    How to Use This Book
    I have found this innovation constraints framework to be applicable to every type of innovation in all of the hundreds of organizations that I have worked with. I have been using the framework (along with appropriate tools) on a daily basis in my teaching, workshops, and consulting to give individuals and organizations the analytical and practical knowledge they need to identify, understand, and overcome the particular constraints they face.
    To put the constraints framework to work in your own situation, you need several things:
An overview of innovation constraints that you reliably apply so that you are sure not to overlook a potential source of disaster
A clear understanding of each of the six main types of innovation constraints
A way to diagnose which of the constraints is particularly critical for the case at hand (there may be more than one) so that you can direct your attention and corrective action appropriately
Ideas for how to satisfy or overcome those key constraints
    Over the next six chapters, I will explore each type of constraint in detail, showing how it operates and why, with plentiful examples drawn from real-world cases. The analysis is followed by a discussion of ways that the particular constraints can be overcome. Toward the end of each chapter, you will find a “constraints diagnostic survey” that you and your colleagues can fill out and score. The surveys are based on my research and consulting work and will serve as a pointer to the most urgent and potentially limiting constraints you are facing. (An electronic version can be found on the book’s Web site.) Appendix A, Using the Assessment Results, presents a process for analyzing your diagnostic results to help you pinpoint the steps you can take to overcome the constraints you have identified in each chapter. The appendix also contains additional exercises to help you move toward action. In the last chapter of the book, I will consider how the constraints model might be applied to your potential customers, explore the big-picture issues in leading an innovation team, and discuss the steps you might take to help your organization become more strategic about innovation.
    Taken together, the analysis, stories, recommendations, and tools in this book provide a springboard for effective action, not a fail-safe recipe for success. No one can give you that recipe, especially when it comes to innovation, which by definition is constantly new. Only you can devise the specific solutions that will work for your particular situation. But if you engage with the analysis in the chapters to come, and follow through with the diagnostic surveys and exercises, you will be able to identify and come to grips with innovation killers with a deeper and sharper understanding of what they are and how you can overcome them.
    Summary
    It is puzzling when people say that they want innovation, then seem to do everything they can to stop it; but this is bound to happen when we rely on our vague intuitions and don’t have a clear idea of what innovation is or how it really works. This mystery is compounded by the thousands upon thousands of authors and thinkers who use differing definitions of innovation and who diverge completely in their prescriptions about how to make it work. However, there is one assumption they all have in common—that there are specific conditions or constraints that have to be met in order for innovation to be successful—that serves as the key for bringing the six perspectives into a single framework.
    The innovation constraints framework described in this book allows you to gain deeper and more specific insights about the constraint or set of constraints that were critical for a particular innovation. By learning to analyze these constraints