After years of working with innovators and pursuing innovation myself, I felt a need to share a different perspective on the challenges to innovation success. This perspective involves the personal side of innovation, exploring the barriers–including nine major “innovation fatigue factors”–that individual innovators face. We show how to recognize and overcome them. The book considers three different levels of fatigue factors: those involving problems at the individual level (including innovators and those they turn to or work with), at the organizational or corporate level (strategy, culture, incentives, and decision making) and also the external level that includes national policies, regulations, and taxation, with special consideration of university-industry relationships, where especially severe lost opportunity occurs.
Preparing the book Conquering Innovation Fatigue was a rewarding process. This book draws upon many experiences and interviews that I have had, along with those of my co-authors. Our book is aimed at helping anyone who cares about innovation to understand innovation at a personal level.
So who’s it for? Anyone who seeks to innovate, drive innovation, or influence innovation. Also, it’s the perfect gift for Father’s Day, Christmas, birthdays, bar mitzvahs, divorces, fans of patents (even chemical patents), you name it. For more information, see the supporting blog, Innovation Fatigue.
Conquering Innovation Fatigue by Jeffrey Dean Lindsay, Cheryl Perkins, and Mukund Karanjikar is published by John Wiley & Sons (2009).
Abbreviated Professional Bio
I recently returned to the US after nine incredible years in In Shanghai, China, where I servedas Head of Intellectual Property for a growing Asian company, APP-China (Asia Pulp and Paper). There were so many unexpected blessings from my time in China, both professionally and personally. But eventually it was time for me to return. I left APP to be Head of R&D and IP for a startup company, Lume Deodorant, and after an exciting adventure there I’m now consulting. Prior to my adventure in Asia, I was also consulting on innovation and IP for Innovationedge for four years, where I got to work with some of the world’s largest companies as well as small startups, lone inventors, and everything in between. I especially loved working with bright, innovative people who were out to deliver breakthrough products and services to the world. Experiences ranged from helping world-class teams develop IP strategy for new products to helping new technologies get connected with partners for licensing and commercialization. I will always be grateful for the privilege I had of working there and learning from such good people.
Before my years at Innovationedge, I was Corporate Patent Strategist at Kimberly-Clark Corporation, a terrific consumer products company. I was at K-C for nearly 14 years in the research community but also working closely with legal and management. My time there included working with about 20 IP committees around the company to help guide our IP strategy and tactics; driving IP generation to cope with the threats and opportunities of disruptive innovation (topics like RFID, emerging IT tools, virtual reality, etc.); guiding design-around activities and applying other tools to strengthen our patents; and leading an aggressive effort to use defensive publications as an important tool in our cost-effective IP strategy. I also founded and led a community of practice called the Intellectual Property Chapter. After many great years with K-C., our Chief Innovation Officer and Senior Vice President, Cheryl Perkins, left to form a start-up company, Innovationedge, centered around innovation, I would soon recognize an opportunity too exciting to ignore.
I’m a registered US Patent Agent with a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Brigham Young University. After BYU I was an Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor at the Institute of Paper Science and Technology (originally the Institute of Paper Chemistry). I really loved the academic life and the bright graduate students during my years at IPST.