DO BIGGER THINGS

Innovation professionals McClure and Wilde provide a blueprint to help readers navigate and thrive in complicated times.

In their debut nonfiction collaboration, the authors confront the seemingly insuperable chaos of the modern world, full of entrenched crises with no clear solutions. “Hard problems aren’t hard simply because they are big,” they point out, referring to everything from climate change to school and community issues. “Problems are hard because they have many parts that are tangled up with one another.” In response to these problems, McClure and Wilde propose the concept of “ecosystem innovation,” a practice that “builds an ecosystem of different actors and resources that all work together to achieve a goal.” They detail (with accompanying diagrams and bulleted points) the business models of entities including Airbnb, the Angry Birds app, and organizations like Solar Sister, a company that seeks to provide affordable power to the 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa who have no electricity. At every step, the authors analyze the strategies used in their examples, such as the “agile pilot” methodology (“Generate many ideas. Make the first trial of an idea as small as possible and test it as quickly as possible—creating a minimum viable product [MVP] to see if an idea works”), which works well for smaller problems (“This is an innovation model that can be done on a small enough scale that you can hide it in a closet”). Wilde and McClure are very clear-eyed guides through all the concepts they explore, and their prose manages to be both information-dense and extremely readable. The sentiment running through their discussions is an inclusive optimism: “Innovation can’t be a mysterious thing that only a handful of special people in exceptional circumstances can do,” they write in a typically energized passage. “You need to be able to step up to a problem worthy of your effort and deliver results with lasting impact.”

Vivid, encouraging guidance for problem solvers of all kinds.