Entrepreneurship from Creativity to Innovation

About the Book

Entrepreneurship from Creativity to Innovation is a unique guide for students, potential entrepreneurs and inventors, business managers, team leaders, or anyone seeking to become a more successful problem solver and innovator. It focuses on the thinking and problem solving skills needed to succeed in our rapidly changing, high-tech world. Entrepreneurial thinking will enable you to cope with uncertainty and behave with greater flexibility in your professional and personal life -- these skills are for everyone! Learning is reinforced through application to communication, teamwork, and entrepreneurship, which in turn will enhance your understanding of innovation -- a valuable skill sought by employers who recognize the ability to innovate as a key for remaining competitive in the global marketplace. Also, at a time when traditional jobs are disappearing, you will be more likely to recognize and profit from new opportunities. Part One of this book presents a holistic view of entrepreneurship and its links to creativity and innovation. You will be introduced to the Herrmann thinking styles model, the creative problem solving model and the Pugh method for developing optimized solutions. In Part Two, you will learn to apply these thinking tools to the product development process, from finding a consumer need and then synthesizing creative ideas down to a "best" concept or solution which can be protected with a patent. Part Three shows how you can apply these tools to business development -- it also provides an overview of resources that are available to entrepreneurs for business startup. Part Four discusses leadership and management strategies for a startup enterprise. It presents the four crucial pillars needed to sustain organizational innovation for growth and profitability: development of everyone's thinking skills; their application by cross-functional teams at the project level; their integration at the organizational level by management; with open communication linking everyone in the enterprise.

About the Author

Dr. Edward Lumsdaine is currently Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Michigan Technological University and Special Professor of Business, Institute for Enterprise and Innovation, University of Nottingham (England), and for many years was management consultant at Ford Motor Company. In 1994 he received the ASEE Chester F. Carlson award for innovation in engineering education. He has coauthored books and teaches workshops in creative problem solving, engineering design, entrepreneurship and innovation — a synthesis of many years of experience as engineer in industry as well as dean of engineering and professor at six different universities in the U.S. and four different universities abroad. Dr. Lumsdaine is a Fellow of ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineering) and the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). His engineering specialties are in aeroacoustics, vibration, heat transfer, fluid mechanics, and energy conservation, and he has published over 100 papers in these fields. Each year, Dr. Lumsdaine and Dr. Binks jointly teach a course in entrepreneurship and effective problem solving for MBA students in Singapore — this book has grown out of this cooperative effort. Dr. Martin Binks is the Director of the Institute for Enterprise and Innovation at the University of Nottingham (UNIEI) and Professor of Entrepreneurial Development at the Nottingham University Business School, specializing in entrepreneurship and the financing of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). He has an established research background in the area of SMEs and their relationship with banks. Among his activities and accomplishments are visiting professor to the Claremont Graduate School in California; provision of consultancy to HM Government ministries and member of the Bank of England Governor's Seminar on the Financing of Small Firms; council member of the Small Business Research Trust; and Associate Editor of The Journal of Small Business Finance. Professor Binks developed one of the first universitylevel course in entrepreneurship in the UK. His research focus is in entrepreneurship, SME finance and the development of internetbased survey procedures such as the United Kingdom Business Barometer (www.ukbb.ac). Dr. Binks is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), and he is also CoDirector of the Center for Integrative Learning at the University of Nottingham.

Dr. Lumsdaine is a Fellow of ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineering) and the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). His engineering specialties are in aero-acoustics, vibration, heat transfer, fluid mechanics, and energy conservation, and he has published over 100 papers in these fields. Each year, Dr. Lumsdaine and Dr. Binks jointly teach a course in entrepreneurship and effective problem solving for MBA students in Singapore — this book has grown out of this cooperative effort.

Dr. Martin Binks is the Director of the Institute for Enterprise and Innovation at the University of Nottingham (UNIEI) and Professor of Entrepreneurial Development at the Nottingham University Business School, specializing in entrepreneurship and the financing of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). He has an established research background in the area of SMEs and their relationship with banks.

Among his activities and accomplishments are visiting professor to the Claremont Graduate School in California; provision of consultancy to HM Government ministries and member of the Bank of England Governor's Seminar on the Financing of Small Firms; council member of the Small Business Research Trust; and Associate Editor of The Journal of Small Business Finance. Professor Binks developed one of the first university-level course in entrepreneurship in the UK. His research focus is in entrepreneurship, SME finance and the development of internet-based survey procedures such as the United Kingdom Business Barometer (www.ukbb.ac).

Dr. Binks is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), and he is also Co-Director of the Center for Integrative Learning at the University of Nottingham.