Denning and Dunham define innovation as the art of getting people to adopt change, making a distinction between innovation and invention: many inventions never become innovations, and many innovations do not involve an invention.

The book's frame is innovation, but on a deeper level it's really concerned with effective leadership - specifically how people create and sustain change in groups.

Making innovation practical and achievable

According to Business Week in 1995, the overall success rate for innovation initiatives is a meagre 4%, supporting the authors' comment that innovation is one of the most vexing leadership challenges of our time.

However, innovation, they say, is a personal skill that can be learned and developed through practice. Furthermore, it can be applied in any context, whatever the scope, ranging from individual to organisational.

The Eight Practices

Through a process of modelling instances of effective innovation the authors identified eight core practices they say are essential to success: sensing, envisioning, offering, adopting, sustaining, executing, leading and embodying. Each is vital and weakness in any of them will compromise the outcome. However, with practice, each can be mastered and innovation become a practical outcome.

1. Sensing possibilities - Sensing and articulating opportunities and their value in a community. Seeing possibilities in breakdowns. Being sensitive to disharmonies.
2. Envisioning new realities - Speculating about a new world where the opportunity is taken care of - and how this might be achieved in reality.
3. Offering new outcomes - Proposing new rules and strategies that offer new outcomes. Listening to concerns and resistance then modifying proposals for better fit. Establishing better credibility to fulfill the offer.
4. Executing plans and actions - Building appropriate infrastructure, processes and teams. Carrying out action plans for reliable delivery.
5. Adopting new practice - Demonstrating value of proposed adoption so that others can commit to it. Aligning action plans for coherence with existing practices and values. Developing marketing strategies for different groups. Recruiting allies. Overcoming resistance.
6. Sustaining integration - Developing and supporting the infrastructure. Aligning new practices with current reality, standards and incentives. Assessing related innovations for negative consequences. Abandoning inappropriate innovations.
7. Leading - Communicating new possibilities in ways that people can commit to them. Moving with care, courage, value, power, focus, sense of larger purpose and realising the impact of how the leader articulates and communicates the vision of change.
8. Embodying the change - When a routine or a habit becomes so ingrained that you can do it without thinking. Where the target community says "this felt unnatural at first but now we do it all the time - it's just how we do things around here".

"Every revolutionary idea seems to invoke three stages of reaction: It's completely impossible. It's possible, but it's not worth doing. And, I said it was a good idea all along."