How did Kevin O'Connor help create DoubleClick, the innovative marketing technology company... two software companies... dozens of products... and now the "disappearing" DVD, a product that will turn the home video market on its head?

Sheer brilliance? While O'Connor is very smart indeed, he credits his success to applying Thomas Edison's famous saying that "genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." In other words, the breakthrough product or service that is the result of sheer genius alone is the exception.

Great ideas that form the basis of new companies or that can make a hero of someone toiling in the corporate world are within reach of us all.

"But wait," says O'Connor, "ideas are cheap." Just as important is doing something with them -- a process that will turn the best ideas into something that people need. In other words, O'Connor argues convincingly, innovation can be systematically forced.

The Map of Innovation is O'Connor's step-by-step approach to devising lucrative new products and services and bringing them to market, through a process that has proven itself time and again in many different industries. Too often, people trying to innovate focus on things that don't matter or waste their time trying to find answers to questions that can't be answered.

O'Connor shows why the map of innovation centers on getting right the five make-or-break fundamentals: