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  • Published: 16 May 2019
  • ISBN: 9781473569690
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 8 hr 25 min
  • Narrator: David Rowan
  • RRP: $21.99

Non-Bullshit Innovation

Radical Ideas from the World’s Smartest Minds




An entertaining and thought-provoking series of case studies on how to future-proof your business in a digital age, from the founding editor of WIRED.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Non-Bullshit Innovation by David Rowan.

David Rowan travels the globe in search of the most exciting and pioneering startups building the future. He’s got to know the founders of WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Google, Spotify, Xiaomi, Didi, Nest, Twitter and countless other ambitious entrepreneurs disrupting businesses in almost every sector. And yet too often the companies they’re disrupting don’t get it. They think they can innovate through jargon: with talk of change agents and co-creation gurus, ideas portals and webinars, make-a-thons and hackfests, paradigm shifts and pilgrimages to Silicon Valley. It’s mostly pointless innovation theatre — corporate nonsense that has little to do with delivering real change. But during this quest he's also discovered some genuinely exciting and transformative approaches to innovation, often in places you might least expect.

Get ready for:
· The airline that rewards passengers for walking their dog
· The bank that performs surgery
· The country that’s an app store
And many more.

Packed full of tips for anyone looking for radical ways to adapt and thrive in the digital age, this carefully curated selection of stories will reveal ideas for creating genuine innovation from some of the world’s most inspiring leaders.

  • Published: 16 May 2019
  • ISBN: 9781473569690
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 8 hr 25 min
  • Narrator: David Rowan
  • RRP: $21.99

About the author

David Rowan

David Rowan was founding Editor-in-chief of WIRED’s UK edition and technology columnist for The Times, GQ, Condé Nast Traveller and The Sunday Times. He travels excessively to meet crazy-driven startup entrepreneurs who are reinventing every industry in fascinating ways. Fortune 100 companies regularly hire him to explain how these startups plan to kill their businesses, and he invests these speaking fees holistically in startups that plan to kill the corporates’ businesses. David founded Voyagers.io to build meaningful community through magical travel adventures. And he’s still searching for the future.

Praise for Non-Bullshit Innovation

In Non-Bullshit Innovation, Rowan combines the deeply researched narrative of a great investigative journalist with the practical punch of a top keynote speaker and delivers a book that is both a deeply engrossing read and a hugely valuable guide. No bullshit.

</i>Dan Cobley, serial entrepreneur, former Google UK MD

Perfectly observed, painfully funny and brutally honest, David Rowan has written a book which goes where no one dared to go. Its wisdom will save you a decade of heartache, confusion and self deception. It is the front line in the fight back towards sanity and the Innovation conversation can never be the same again.

</i>Mark Adams, Chief Innovation Officer, <i>VICE

In his meticulously researched and persuasive book, David Rowan makes a compelling case for what innovation really looks like. It's jam packed with tangible tips on how to create the right environment for good ideas to flourish and concrete examples of how the best in the world manage to make things that make a difference.

Hannah Fry, author of <i>Hello World: How to Be Human in the Digital Age

A truly important book that all founders-CEOs should read. David Rowan’s reporting on how people and companies across the world approach building the future has been enlightening and will help me building my company going forward.

</i>Dr. Kris Naudts, CEO-Founder, Culture Trip

Non-Bullshit Innovation, by the guru David Rowan, [is] a must-read for anyone looking for radical ways to adapt and thrive in the digital age, with tips from some of the world’s top leaders on how to create genuine innovation and deliver real change.

Brent Hoberman, serial entrepreneur and founder of Made.com, Lastminute.com and Founders Forum

Highly recommend David Rowan new book Non-Bullshit Innovation for anyone who wants to understand how the future will be made. He travelled from Peru to China to find the best stories of transformation.

Tommy Stadlen, founder Swing Technologies and co-author of Connect: How Companies Succeed by Engaging Radically With Society

Massively recommend 'David Rowan's new book 'Non-Bullshit Innovation' - it does exactly what the title promises, showing the best examples of real business innovation, with no guff at all.

</i>Rohan Silver, Co-Founder of Second Home

Wired UK seems to have provided Rowan, who was its founding editor, with an enviable launch pad from which he blasts off to talk to the world’s most innovative people and companies. He does not squander the opportunity... Rowan’s quest for "non-bullshit strategies that can really deliver" takes him from Tallinn to Hangzhou. It is an entertaining quest, well told, and illustrated with plenty of fresh examples from beyond the usual well-worn Silicon Valley legends.

FT Business Books of the Month

In this remarkable book, David Rowan has gone all around the world chronicling what is happening inside businesses as they invent the future. In each case he tells a story of transformation: how an organisation has found a new way of doing things through innovation driven by ruthless entrepreneurial imagination. What is especially useful about Rowan’s journey is that he sticks to real examples of things that are actually happening, eschewing the vague abstractions so popular with innovation gurus — hence "non-bullshit" in the title. He does not just stick with small startups, let alone dreamy "inventors". He finds innovation in big companies and even within governments. And he focuses on the creation of markets, not just the invention of machines and gadgets: that is to say, innovation rather than invention.

Matt Ridley, The Times

This witty, timely book reminds us that every industry is human-made and for all our faults -- the ability to bullshit being one of them -- we are an incredibly innovative, diverse, collaborative and sociable species, capable of amazing things when we work together. This is a reassuringly optimistic message and a counterpoint to the fear that machine intelligence will dehumanise business.

Grow Magazine, </i>Facebook