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Red Thread Thinking: Weaving Together Connections for Brilliant Ideas and Profitable Innovation Kindle Edition

by Debra Kaye (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.1 48 ratings

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Create products and services your consumers can'tpass up--without the high cost of development

Success is all about connections.

Debra Kaye explodes conventional thinking about innovation and provides an approach that anyone or any business can use to expose the crucial links among observations, experiences, facts, and feelings that on the surface do not seem related--but are--to uncover fresh, brilliant insights. In Red Thread Thinking, Kaye shows you how to weave originality from disparate information and turn it into a product or service that can shake up the marketplace--and your business.

What sets Red Thread Thinking apart from other books is that it reveals exactly how to identify and understand hidden cultural codes and shifts in consumerperceptions that speak to emerging and existing markets and, as a result, catapult fresh products to iconic status.

A mold-breaking system, Red Thread Thinking sharpens your innovation skills and can assist in problem solving, whether preparing a talk, pitching a project to your colleagues and boss, managing staff in a more productive way, or taking business to a new level. Learn the ways of Red Thread Thinking:

Red Thread One: "Innovation--It's All in Your Head"--We can fire up our brains to become better at observing and interpreting what we see around us

Red Thread Two: "Everything Old is New"--Take a fresh look at the past to gain remarkable advantage

Red Thread Three: "People: The Strangest Animals in the Zoo"--Know what makes your market tick, and you'llknow what makes them spend

Red Thread Four: "What You See Is What You Get"--Learn how to create an entirely new and accessible "language" to make your product stand out and beuniversally understood

Red Thread Five: "The Force of Passion"--Persevere, review, and refine your ideas without compromising your integrity or core beliefs.

Red Thread Thinking teaches you to activate your own knowledge and resources to make better connections, have more and superior insights, and apply history as a valuable source for future-leaning innovation.

Praise for Red Thread Thinking

"Red Thread Thinking weaves a marvelous tapestry of insight and wisdom. A must read for entrepreneurs hoping to take their ideas from fuzzy to firm." -- Susan Cain, New York Times bestselling author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

"Red Thread Thinking provides a deliberate system to create a 'revolution in your mind'--the first order of business for any innovator who wants to shift the consumer landscape and offer value and usefulness to customers. The book is filled with practical informationthat will help you expand your thinking." -- Jay Walker, Chairman, Walker Digital; founder of Priceline.com

"A fascinating read that should hearten anyone who wants to apply proven strategies to the act of collecting and connecting dots that exist for us all--if only we'd stop and notice." -- Danny Meyer, New York Times bestselling author of Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business

"In Red Thread Thinking, Debra Kaye offers a framework for innovation that embraces--indeed harnesses--the power of serendipity, free association, and our mind's elastic ability to see what's new in the familiar." -- Jean-Marie Dru, Chairman, TBWA\Worldwide

"Debra Kaye has created an approach to innovation that combines simple, pragmatic steps on the journey of innovation to benefit any serious entrepreneur or manager who believes innovation is central to business and that it is not the mysterious privilege of a few." -- Thomas Pinnau, Chief Executive Officer, Knowledge Universe Work-Life Solutions

"Red Thread Thinking offers a compelling framework for the modern-day innovator--one who wants to operate with a big consumer knowledge but with or without a sizeable infrastructure and budget." -- Jed C. Scala, Vice President and General Manager, Credit Card Products, American Express

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

This is not a do-it-yourself manual for innovation. Instead, consultant Kaye shares her distinctive process for discovering inventions for profit. The thinking she shares is pure marketing-research driven. Her points are fascinating but not necessarily easy to replicate by every wannabe inventor. Brainstorming, she says, is pretty much a waste of time and energy unless you start by listing wrong or misguided ideas. Failures can make for later successes (e.g., Silly Putty). Most important are her anecdotes of success: the Togo hands-free baby carrier, invented by a Peace Corps nurse serving in Africa, and the rejuvenation of Gatorade by positioning it as an after-workout beverage. Genius is indeed one-percent inspiration. --Barbara Jacobs

Review

"Innovation is no longer just about scheduling brainstorming sessions and believing you can turn on and off the flow of your creative juices. It's a way of thinking, inspired by an oriental legend (explained in the beginning), designed to help you make connections you might not have before by identifying and merging five threads to generate 'brilliant ideas and profitable innovations.' My favorite part? Little case studies and personal stories! Kaye shares personal experience and other businesses's failures and success on things form chocolate to water filters to pet food to barbies and they prove her concepts. So you know it's not just talk. Plus they add a fun element. I doubt you'd be disappointed - it doesn't matter what stage you're at in your career or life - this book will give you an advantage." --Anne Reuss, SteamFeed - Marketing, Social Media and Tech Truth
"The author demonstrates how and why an individual is the starting point for innovation, and why organization culture change methods so often fail to materialize. Debra Kaye goes beyond the standard approaches to creative thinking and innovation, and presents evidence that while the two concepts are related, they are not the same thing. The author also shares the important lesson that an innovation must be seen as having value in the marketplace, and have some outstanding quality to give it staying power within that market...I highly recommend the results oriented and insightful book to any business leaders, managers, entrepreneurs, and would be innovators seeking an effective, individual based approach to innovation." --Wayne Hurlbert, Blog Business World

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00BCIQLTI
Publisher ‏ : ‎ McGraw Hill; 1st edition (March 1, 2013)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 1, 2013
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1333 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 273 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #353,214 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #45 in Business Research & Development
- #88 in Business Education
- #92 in Management Skills

Customer Reviews:
4.1 48 ratings

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Debra Kaye

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DEBRA KAYE is an international innovation expert specializing in culture and brand strategy for consumer businesses. She helps clients define new areas of business opportunity, develop new products and restructure markets for long-term growth. Her clients have included L'Oreal, Dove Chocolate, Mars Petcare, Colgate, McDonald's, American Express, Kimberly-Clark and many more. A columnist for Entrepreneur.com, frequent commentator on American Public Radio's "Marketplace" and contributor to Fast Company, she is head of the innovation consultancy Lucule and former CEO of TBWAItaly. She lives in New York City.

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4.1 out of 5

48 global ratings

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Maxim P.

Finally, a business book that's all subsutance

Reviewed in the United States on May 27, 2013

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See all those 5-star reviews? They're completely deserved.

I've been in the process of starting my business, and have been reading all sorts of books - The $100 Startup , The 4-Hour Workweek , The Lean Startup , The Startup Owner's Manual , and many others. I'm disappointed to say that although entertaining, some of these books are fluff - filled with countless stories of other people that "did it", and very little practical, actionable advice. Of course, The Lean Startup is an exception - it's now accepted as instant classic, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

I was really, really happy to see that Read Thread Thinking is no fluff at all. It's a serious text that strikes the perfect balance between specific instructions and generalized thinking to help you brainstorm and develop ideas. The book is thorough, well written, uses exemplary stories, and really drills the kind of thinking you need to innovate. I applied the author's techniques to come up with many new ideas for my own business, and in general now approach problems much more creatively. 100% recommend.

One last note - like The Lean Startup, this book is a serious read. It won't tell you the story of Jimmy who started with $4 in his bedroom and now runs a multi-million dollar firm. It won't give you a 5-step plan for making your first billion. However, if you give the book the attention it deserves, it will genuinely impact and fundamentally transform your thinking, enabling you to tackle and solve business issues on your own. It teaches you to catch the proverbial fish.

10 people found this helpful

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Ian Mann

and with a better chance of success

Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2017

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This is a practical guide for innovative thinking, a method for making innovation more deliberate, and with a better chance of success.
Author Debra Kaye’s approach is much closer to how innovations emerge. Her’s is not a “paint-by-numbers” approach. Innovation, she explains, has its roots in “fragments of thoughts and memories, new information, playful imaginings, and data.” Combined these form a strong knowledge base that can then be used for meaningful innovation.
“I believe the best innovations are the result of unexpected connections among history, technology, culture, behaviour, needs, and emotions,” she explains.
The vast majority of books I have read on innovation are retrospective. They describe how inventors found their insights. In contrast, this book describes what you need to do to develop insights that can advance your ideas and innovations.
“Creativity” is a different way of achieving a result, but that is not enough to make a profitable product or service. To be profitable, it must captivate consumers in a significantly compelling way. Enough people must see the value in what you have made to make it commercially viable.
Many years ago, a colleague said that he “is not creative.” That assertion has stuck with me and has continued to concern me. Intuitively, I knew it was wrong.
In the first few chapters of this book, Kaye brings a significant body of evidence to prove that everyone can be creative. Geoffrey Moore, author of Dealing with Darwin, asserts “Evolution requires us to continually refresh our competitive advantage. … To innovate forever, in other words, is not an aspiration; it is a design specification (in human being).”
Neurogenesis, the science of growing brain cells, has proven that you can develop specific areas of your brain through activity. Spend more time on activities that enhance creativity and innovation and that aspect of your brain develops.
People can enhance their brain’s ability to innovate by exposure to four core areas. These are “capturing” new ideas, the engagement in challenging tasks, the broadening of your knowledge, and interacting with stimulating people and places.
Yes, creativity or innovative thinking can be practiced, learned, and enhanced.
Robert Epstein, PhD conducted an experiment in Orange County, California, involving 74 city employees. They were trained intensively in the four core areas described above. “Eight months after the training, the employees had increased their rate of new idea generation by 55 percent, bringing in more than $600,000 in new revenue and a savings of about $3.5 million through innovative cost reductions.”
McCaffrey studied 100 significant modern and 1,000 historical inventions. He was looking for the method that these successful inventors used to uncover the information that solved the problem. He second, they built a solution based on that feature. The opposite of this is what psychologists call “functional fixedness,” the overlooking of unusual features
An example of this functional fixedness is having a burr stick to your sweater. Most people who notice the burr dislodge it. The person who gets beyond “functional fixedness” focuses on how it sticks to a sweater then goes on to invent Velcro. (This is how Velcro was invented.)
A common method for idea generation is the group technique of Brainstorming. Kaye cautions against, this pointing out that the public nature of the activity actually inhibits wide range ideas. She prefers two more free-flowing and less contrived methods.
The first is freeing one’s mind completely by engaging in a “mindless” activity that allows your brain to relax and expand. The second is actually exercising your brain so that it becomes stronger and better at innovating.
Kaye highlights many other important facts about innovation that are often overlooked. Among these are that insights and ideas take time to clarify and form into a profitable innovation. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, for example, explained that his idea needed at least a decade to mature.
Most “original” ideas are not completely original. Einstein’s E = mc2 was based on the research of others. The breakthrough was discovering how to bring them together.
Your last failure may be part of your next success, she points out. Post-it Notes was the result of a weak glue, unintentionally developed by Dr. Spence Silver at 3M. He did not discard it. Instead, he wondered what purpose it might serve, and years later, a friend found the purpose. The result is the $3b year product.
Pharmaceutical companies have to be alert to unexpected benefits because their R&D costs are so high. Pfizer struggled with the expensive development of sildenafil, a drug intended to treat angina. The developers noticed that the drug had an odd side effect. Six years later, the FDA approved Viagra for the marketplace.
Latisse, drops that help eyelashes grow longer and thicker, had a similar genesis. It was originally intended to treat glaucoma.
This book was written with the individual in mind rather than the corporation. Despite the budgets large organizations have for innovation, it is individual who bring these to light. Large corporates generally suffer from a stifling maze of red tape and bureaucracy. Working on your own is not necessarily an impediment.
Innovation is something new and of value to consumers that generates profitable growth and improves competitive advantage. If you wait for things to get better, they certainly will— but not necessarily for you.
“The beauty of making innovation part of your daily life,” writes Kaye, is that you just may think of a way to solve the world’s biggest problems while you are trying to solve a small and personal one.”

Readability Light --+-- Serious
Insights High -+--- Low
Practical High --+-- Low

Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy

Helpful

Steph & Tony McCaffrey

Beyond the Hype to Real Innovation

Reviewed in the United States on May 29, 2013

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Here is a book on innovation that is finally grounded in science! Finally, a book that gives it to us straight--without the hype--and helps us to practically apply it. For example, in chapter 2, "Stop Brainstorming and Take a Shower," science is finally being paid attention to! As a cognitive psychologist, this simple fact makes me so happy! Brainstorming has never been a very good technique. No controlled experiment, and there have been quite a few (in 1958, 1968, 1974, 1976, 1987, 1991, 1994, 1995, 1996, and on and on), has ever shown brainstorming to be better than having people work on the problem alone for a while and then get together to share their ideas, build on them, rank them, and select the ones to move ahead on. Debra Kaye goes even further to present some of the results from meditation and sleep studies that show the power of "down time" for realizing important insights and connections. Elsewhere, Debra Kaye sums up the science to dispel some misleading ideas such as (1) the popular notion that the brain's right-hemisphere holds exclusive importance in creativity and (2) that youth have an advantage when it comes to innovation.

Continually grounded in science, Debra Kaye then goes on to mold and shape the scientific results into practical methods to help entrepreneurs and business people be more productive and profitable. A wonderful book! I wish more books were so grounded in science.

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C888

Highly recommended

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 27, 2021

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Highly recommended

MAT

Concept ok no manual for success

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 23, 2013

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The book is ok but I have read better innovation books. Too much on examples of innovation thinking/examples and too little on the practical side of how to innovate.

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Red Thread Thinking: Weaving Together Connections for Brilliant Ideas and Profitable Innovation Kindle Edition

Create products and services your consumers can'tpass up--without the high cost of development

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