Achieving faster, better, cheaper, and more creative innovation outcomes with the 5X5 framework: 5 people, 5 days, 5 experiments, $5,000, and 5 weeks. What is the best way for a company to innovate? Advice recommending "innovation vacations" and the luxury of failure may be wonderful for organizations with time to spend and money to waste. The Innovator's Hypothesis addresses the innovation priorities of companies that live in the real world of limits. Michael Schrage advocates a cultural and strategic shift: small teams, collaboratively-and competitively-crafting business experiments that make top management sit up and take notice. He introduces the 5x5 framework: giving diverse teams of five people up to five days to come up with portfolios of five business experiments costing no more than $5,000 each and taking no longer than five weeks to run. Successful 5x5s, Schrage shows, make people more effective innovators, and more effective innovators mean more effective innovations.

How companies like Amazon and Netflix know what "you might also like" the history, technology, business, and social impact of online recommendation engines.Increasingly, our technologies are giving us better, faster, smarter, and more personal advice than our own families and best friends. Amazon already knows what kind of books and household goods you like and is more than eager to recommend more; YouTube and TikTok always have another video lined up to show you; Netflix has crunched the numbers of your viewing habits to suggest whole genres that you would enjoy. In this volume in the MIT Press's Essential Knowledge series, innovation expert Michael Schrage explains the origins, technologies, business applications, and increasing societal impact of recommendation engines, the systems that allow companies worldwide to know what products, services, and experiences "you might also like." Schrage offers a history of recommendation that reaches back to antiquity's oracles and astrologers; recounts the academic origins and commercial evolution of recommendation engines; explains how these systems work, discussing key mathematical insights, including the impact of machine learning and deep learning algorithms; and highlights user experience design challenges. He offers brief but incisive case studies of the digital music service Spotify; ByteDance, the owner of TikTok; and the online personal stylist Stitch Fix. Finally, Schrage considers the future of technological recommenders: Will they leave us disappointed and dependent--or will they help us discover the world and ourselves in novel and serendipitous ways?

For organizations that care about innovation,  individual creativity isn't enough anymore -- people  need to be in creative, collaborative  relationships. But without the knowledge and tools for  building these relationships, innovation expert Michael  Schrage argues, one will not be successful in the  offices of today and even less so in the  "virtual" offices of tomorrow. No More  Teams gives readers the tools and  techniques to go beyond the lazy cliches of  "teamwork" to the practical benefits of  collaboration. When Schrage studied the world's greatest  collaborations -- including Wozniak and Jobs,  Picasso and Braque, Watson and Crick -- he found that  instead of relying on charisma, they all created  "shared spaces" where they could play with  their ideas. By effectively using technological  tools available in most workplaces -- anything from  a felt tip pen and a napkin to specialized  computer software - -you can literally map your  discussion as it is happening, making it possible to  keep all the good ideas, cope with every objection,  handle conflicts as they arise, and, ultimately,  master the unknown.