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.
- 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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