The Innovation Tournament Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Exceptional Solutions to Any Challenge

What new products or services should you launch next year? How can you improve the productivity of a paint line? What should you name your new venture? How can you decrease patient waiting times? How can you improve the customer experience?

Pretty much any creative problem-solving task can be framed as seeking a new match between solution and need, from operational process improvements to creating strategies to foster organic growth. Innovation tournaments aim to find a match that is not just good, but exceptional.

Leveraging more than two decades of experience organizing innovation tournaments in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, from Buenos Aires to Kuwait City, Shanghai to Moscow, and with many Fortune 500 companies, two renowned researchers, entrepreneurs, and the foremost experts on innovation tournaments offer a template that you can use to generate winning ideas that will drive great outcomes—whatever your challenges, whatever your business.

In The Innovation Tournament Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Exceptional Solutions to Any Challenge, Wharton professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl T. Ulrich offer an engaging, often humorous, and always actionable guide to help you learn:

--How to frame and articulate your specific innovation challenge
--How to decide on the right format, structure, and strategic direction for your own innovation tournament
--How to maximize the quality of the opportunities that will compete
--How to select the very best ideas
--How to develop those ideas into real-world opportunities
--How to use tournaments to foster a culture of innovation

Fast-reading and filled with real-world successes, The Innovation Tournament Handbook is a comprehensive roadmap to finding a new match between a solution and a need that is not merely good, but exceptional.

Christian Terwiesch is the Andrew M. Heller Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is a professor in Wharton’s Operations and Information Management department and codirector of Penn’s Mack Institute for Innovation Management. He also holds a faculty appointment in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine. His research on operations management and on innovation management appears in many of the leading academic journals, including Management Science and the New England Journal of Medicine.

Terwiesch is coauthor of The Innovation Tournament Handbook; Matching Supply with Demand, a widely used operations management textbook that is now in its third edition; Innovation Tournaments; and Connected Strategies, which combines his expertise in the fields of operations, innovation, and strategy to help companies take advantage of digital technology leading to new business models.

Karl T. Ulrich is CIBC Endowed Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also professor of mechanical engineering. His most recent project was the design and construction of Tangen Hall, the largest facility in the world for student entrepreneurship. He cofounded Venture Lab, the Weiss Tech House, and the Integrated Product Design Program, institutions fostering innovation in the university community.

He is coauthor of The Innovation Tournament Handbook (Wharton School Press, 2023); Product Design and Development (7th edition, McGraw-Hill, 2019), a textbook used by a quarter of a million students worldwide; Innovation Tournaments (Harvard Business Review Press, 2009); and Winning in China (Wharton School Press, 2021).