Making Stone Soup: How to Jumpstart Innovation Teams

Making Stone Soup is a colorful and entertaining how-to guide for jumpstarting innovation teams.

In the classic children's story, Stone Soup, three hungry strangers come to a wary village and set an empty cauldron in the town square. Using only their imagination, cleverness, and ability to improvise, they quickly enlist the skeptical townsfolk one by one until each has contributed a little something to the sumptuous feast. The story is a lesson on how to use a little creativity to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Making Stone Soup shares this simple and clear recipe for making collaborative innovation happen in four simple steps:

1. Setting high quality targets
2. Enlisting deep and diverse domain experts
3. Taking multiple shots on goal
4. Learning from experience and experiments

Making Stone Soup is short, fun and to the point. It's an excellent guide for anyone launching an innovation team, leading a creative project, or developing a novel solution. It's easy to understand and follow.

Making Stone Soup is filled with free resources to help you get started:

- A how-to jumpstart innovation video
- An innovation leadership assessment
- Access to a wide array of articles on innovation

Making Stone Soup gives you everything you need to make collaborative innovation happen.


Praise for Making Stone Soup

"In Making Stone Soup Jeff DeGraff once again brings deep and practical insight into how individuals and organizations innovate, why some teams succeed and others fail, and most importantly how you can improve yourself and your teams to create real innovation."
--Dr. Peter Hortensius, Senior Vice President and Technology Officer, Lenovo

"Jeff is one of the most engaging teachers, consultants and 'provocateurs' in the area of innovation. He packs his vast skills and experiences into this delightful new book. Moving seamlessly between concepts, stories and practices, Jeff offers a framework for innovation that is compelling, pragmatic yet visionary. It is a great read and a terrific guide for all of us who need to make 'stone soup' to innovate and grow!"
--Raghu Krishnamoorthy, Vice President of Executive Development, Chief Learning Officer, Head GE Crotonville Global Leadership Institute at General Electric

"As a CEO in the knowledge economy, I've learned that collaboration is the key to innovation. Jeff DeGraff has been a fundamental influence on me and my company, Big Think, to get us to understand and apply that learning. This book will help you do the same."
--Victoria Montgomery Brown, Co-founder and CEO of Big Think

"The Dean of Innovation has done it again! Making Stone Soup is both engaging and powerful; it should be required reading for leaders looking to build innovation teams. Cutting-edge research, compelling stories, and practical tools are shared in a fun and thoughtful manner. Highly recommend."
--Josh Linkner, Founder of E-Prize, New York Times Best Selling Author, and Columnist