Peter J. Denning

Two experts show that innovation is a skill that can be learned and describe eight essential practices for achieving success.Innovation is the ruling buzzword in business today. Technology companies invest billions in developing new gadgets; business leaders see innovation as the key to a competitive edge; policymakers craft regulations to foster a climate of innovation. And yet businesses report a success rate of only four percent for innovation initiatives. Can we significantly increase our odds of success? In The Innovator''s Way, innovation experts Peter Denning and Robert Dunham reply with an emphatic yes. Innovation, they write, is not simply an invention, a policy, or a process to be managed. It is a personal skill that can be learned, developed through practice, and extended into organizations.

Two experts show that innovation is a skill that can be learned and describe eight essential practices for achieving success.Innovation is the ruling buzzword in business today. Technology companies invest billions in developing new gadgets; business leaders see innovation as the key to a competitive edge; policymakers craft regulations to foster a climate of innovation. And yet businesses report a success rate of only four percent for innovation initiatives. Can we significantly increase our odds of success? In The Innovators Way, innovation experts Peter Denning and Robert Dunham reply with an emphatic yes. Innovation, they write, is not simply an invention, a policy, or a process to be managed. It is a personal skill that can be learned, developed through practice, and extended into organizations.Denning and Dunham identify and describe eight personal practices that all successful innovators perform: sensing, envisioning, offering, adopting, sustaining, executing, leading, and embodying. Together, these practices can boost a fledgling innovator to success. Weakness in any of these practices, they show, blocks innovation. Denning and Dunham chart the path to innovation mastery, from individual practices to teams and social networks.

This pocket-sized introduction to computational thinking and problem-solving traces its genealogy centuries before the digital computer.A few decades into the digital era, scientists discovered that thinking in terms of computation made possible an entirely new way of organizing scientific investigation. Eventually, every field had a computational branch: computational physics, computational biology, computational sociology. More recently, computational thinking has become part of the K12 curriculum. But what is computational thinking? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers an accessible overviewtracing a genealogy that begins centuries before digital computers and portraying computational thinking as the pioneers of computing have described it.The authors explain that computational thinking (CT) is not a set of concepts for programming; it is a way of thinking that is honed through practice: the mental skills for designing computations to do jobs for us, and for explaining and interpreting the world as a complex of information processes. Mathematically trained experts (known as computers) who performed complex calculations as teams engaged in CT long before electronic computers. In each chapter, the author identify different dimensions of todays highly developed CT: Computational Methods Computing Machines Computing Education Software Engineering Computational Science DesignAlong the way, they debunk inflated claims for CT and computation while making clear the power of CT in all its complexity and multiplicity.