Innovation Leaders: How Senior Executives Stimulate, Steer and Sustain Innovation

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the result of almost 30 years of hands-on immersion in the fascinating and evolving topic of innovation management. It started in the early 1980s at Arthur D. Little (ADL), a truly innovative consulting company, when, together with colleagues from Europe and the US, I interviewed a sample of innovative companies to discover innovation’s key drivers and obstacles. This initial group included, among others, Frederik van Oene, Bob Tomasko, Kamal Saad and Tom Sommerlatte, who have since become friends and discussion partners. Together, we held innumerable and passionate exchanges on the essence of innovation, its culture and process, and we developed our first conceptual tools to map and measure it. I thank them all ...