The Uncertainty Mindset: Innovation Insights from the Frontiers of Food

Innovation is how businesses stay ahead of the competition and adapt to market conditions that change in unpredictable and uncertain ways. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, high-end cuisine underwent a profound transformation. Once an industry that prioritized consistency and reliability, it turned into one where constant change was a competitive necessity. A top restaurant’s reputation and success have become so closely bound up with its ability to innovate that a new organizational form, the culinary research and development team, has emerged. The best of these R&D teams continually expand the frontiers of food—they invent a constant stream of new dishes, new cooking processes and methods, and even new ways of experiencing food. How do they achieve this nonstop novelty? And what can culinary research and development teach us about how organizations innovate?

Vaughn Tan opens up the black box of elite culinary R&D to provide essential insights. Drawing on years of unprecedented access to the best and most influential culinary R&D teams in the world, he reveals how they exemplify what he calls the uncertainty mindset. Such a mindset intentionally incorporates uncertainty into organization design rather than simply trying to reduce risk. It changes how organizations hire, set goals, and motivate team members and leads organizations to work in highly unconventional ways. A revelatory look at the R&D kitchen, The Uncertainty Mindset upends conventional wisdom about how to organize for innovation and offers practical insights for businesses trying to become innovative and adaptable.

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The Uncertainty Mindset: Innovation Insights from the Frontiers of Food

Innovation is how businesses stay ahead of the competition and adapt to market conditions that change in unpredictable and uncertain ways. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, high-end cuisine underwent a profound transformation. Once an industry that prioritized consistency and reliability, it turned into one where constant change was a competitive necessity. A top restaurant’s reputation and success have become so closely bound up with its ability to innovate that a new organizational form, the culinary research and development team, has emerged. The best of these R&D teams continually expand the frontiers of food—they invent a constant stream of new dishes, new cooking processes and methods, and even new ways of experiencing food. How do they achieve this nonstop novelty? And what can culinary research and development teach us about how organizations innovate?

Vaughn Tan opens up the black box of elite culinary R&D to provide essential insights. Drawing on years of unprecedented access to the best and most influential culinary R&D teams in the world, he reveals how they exemplify what he calls the uncertainty mindset. Such a mindset intentionally incorporates uncertainty into organization design rather than simply trying to reduce risk. It changes how organizations hire, set goals, and motivate team members and leads organizations to work in highly unconventional ways. A revelatory look at the R&D kitchen, The Uncertainty Mindset upends conventional wisdom about how to organize for innovation and offers practical insights for businesses trying to become innovative and adaptable.

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The Uncertainty Mindset: Innovation Insights from the Frontiers of Food

The Uncertainty Mindset: Innovation Insights from the Frontiers of Food

by Vaughn Tan
The Uncertainty Mindset: Innovation Insights from the Frontiers of Food

The Uncertainty Mindset: Innovation Insights from the Frontiers of Food

by Vaughn Tan

eBook

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Overview

Innovation is how businesses stay ahead of the competition and adapt to market conditions that change in unpredictable and uncertain ways. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, high-end cuisine underwent a profound transformation. Once an industry that prioritized consistency and reliability, it turned into one where constant change was a competitive necessity. A top restaurant’s reputation and success have become so closely bound up with its ability to innovate that a new organizational form, the culinary research and development team, has emerged. The best of these R&D teams continually expand the frontiers of food—they invent a constant stream of new dishes, new cooking processes and methods, and even new ways of experiencing food. How do they achieve this nonstop novelty? And what can culinary research and development teach us about how organizations innovate?

Vaughn Tan opens up the black box of elite culinary R&D to provide essential insights. Drawing on years of unprecedented access to the best and most influential culinary R&D teams in the world, he reveals how they exemplify what he calls the uncertainty mindset. Such a mindset intentionally incorporates uncertainty into organization design rather than simply trying to reduce risk. It changes how organizations hire, set goals, and motivate team members and leads organizations to work in highly unconventional ways. A revelatory look at the R&D kitchen, The Uncertainty Mindset upends conventional wisdom about how to organize for innovation and offers practical insights for businesses trying to become innovative and adaptable.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780231551878
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Publication date: 07/28/2020
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
File size: 942 KB

About the Author

Vaughn Tan is an assistant professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at University College London’s School of Management. He previously worked for Google in California.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Part I. A Partial History of New Ideas in Food
1. From the Margins to the Center
2. The Undercurrents of the New
Part II. What Is Innovation in Food?
3. Well-Known, Barely Understood
4. Four Types of New Ideas in Food
Part III. Innovation Is Uncertainty
5. A Nondelusional Worldview
6. The Uncertainty Mindset
Part IV. Building the Ever-Changing Team
7. Innovation Implies Change
8. Building Innovation Dream Teams
Part V. Creating the New Familiar
9. The Power of Familiar Novelty
10. Learning House Style
Part VI. Staying in the Discomfort Zone
11. The Motivation Paradox
12. Desperation by Design
Part VII. Insights from the Frontiers of Food
13. All Change
14. A Mindset for an Uncertain World
Notes
References
Index

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