Disrupt Together

Book excerpt: Innovation can be taught. Disrupt Together shows how. It introduces a breakthrough transdisciplinary, team-based approach to innovation that integrates business, design and engineering, and can deliver powerful results for both new ventures and existing companies. Building on the Philadelphia University curriculum redesign that is reshaping how innovation is taught worldwide, Dr. Stephen Spinelli Jr. and Heather McGowan demonstrate the tight linkages between innovation and opportunity recognition, and show how to identify relevant opportunities more effectively than ever before. They cover every facet of innovation, including design processes, team development, ethnography, audits and charrettes, opportunity shaping and assessment, business models, value delivery, systems thinking, social and environmental capital, financial resilience, culture, strategy, and more. Spinelli and McGowan conclude with a full chapter on innovation cycles and traps. Disrupt Together will serve as the definitive companion text for a growing number of innovation and entrepreneurship programs that either follow the Philadelphia University model or have been influenced by it.