From Strategy+Business. In the list:

- The Innovator's Solution
- Open Innovation
- Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
- The Support Economy
- Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress, 1903-2003
- The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea
- Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom Heist
- Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround
- Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

My pick: "The Innovator's Solution" by Christensen and Raynor.

This week, the results of the four state elections in the Hindi heartland (MP, Rajasthan, Chattisgarh and Delhi) were out. The Congress was the incumbent in all four states. It lost three of them to the BJP, managing to only retain Delhi. Shekhar Gupta of the Indian Express captures the mood prevailing in the Indian voters and the sad state of the Congress:

[Sonia Gandhi's] generals are not willing to match their skills with the BJP’s, her colonels are not willing to leave the comfort of their homes and business to join battle, and the troops are in disarray. Amazing, how a party that brought in the computers into elections (1984), then Sam Pitroda with his promise of high-tech revolution and Rajiv Gandhi with his promise of 21st century India, now speaks a language frozen in the seventies. Its thinking on economics has regressed, it sees privatisation as the loot of public wealth, banking reform an insult to the memory of the senior Mrs G, clings to the least creative of its old guard (one of them told me the other day the way for the Congress to revive itself was to re-establish contact with the generation of freedom fighters!), is afraid of throwing a Manmohan Singh even into the Delhi campaign, and refuses to create a new B-team. It fails to project its chief ministers as stars. Why was S.M. Krishna not paraded in Jaipur and Bhopal? “I will do for tourism in Rajasthan what my colleague did for IT in Bangalore.” That is one line we never heard from a Gehlot.

It instinctively denies the arrival of a new India, awash with a feel-good mood not seen since Rajiv’s first year in power, and powered by a new voter who asks real questions on his quality of life, rather than succumb to old slogans, mantras and the pull of any dynasty. You send tacky, free school-bags to children who have seen better bags on their TV screens. You insult them. What this voter is telling you is, don’t throw me a freebie. Promise me a much better tomorrow — it’s my right. The party fails to understand that the Gandhi-Nehru nostalgia may not have ended but is waning, that nearly five crore (50 million) voters in the 2004 elections would have actually been born after Indira Gandhi’s assassination and that they will vote on a promise of a better future than on the prejudices or loyalties of the past. How come the same voter that throws you in the gutter in three states, votes you back so thumpingly in the fourth? A party that does not ask itself these questions and wrestles with their answers lives in the past and the only message it gives its constituency is that it cannot guarantee a future. And if there is one thing the New Indian Voter is not ready to compromise with, it is the future. Irrespective of what your ancestors did for his in the past.

The past few years have seen an amazing rise in self-confidence and self-belief in urban and semi-urban India. I hope that the winners in the elections can deliver on the expectations and promises. India has an opportunity that cannot now be squandered. For two generations, the politicians have overpromised and underdelivered. Hopefully, this time around the message from the electorate is very clear.

Here. The winners:

Bioscience: Raymond Damadian, president and chairman of FONAR. Dr Damadian first proposed the idea of using the principle of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) as an “external probe for the detection of internal cancer”.

Computing: Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium. In 1989, Mr Berners-Lee proposed a scheme to enable electronic documents to link to other documents stored on other computers. This idea later grew into the world wide web

Telecoms: Paul Baran, co-founder, the Institute for the Future. In 1959, Dr Baran began to think about ways to make America's communications infrastructure resistant to a nuclear attack. He proposed using a system called “distributed adaptive message block switching”, known today as packet switching.

Energy: Geoffrey Ballard, chairman, General Hydrogen. In the late 1970s, Dr Ballard began research into fuel cells as a means of addressing the problem of smog in large cities. Fuel cells combine stored hydrogen with oxygen from the air to generate electricity, water vapour and no harmful emissions.

No Boundaries: Ronald Coase, professor emeritus of economics, University of Chicago Law School. In papers published in 1959 and 1960, Dr Coase asked why valuable radio spectrum was going to waste. He suggested that the problem was the lack of private property rights over spectrum, which prevented the formation of a market to allocate spectrum efficiently. The answer, he proposed, was to open the allocation of radio spectrum to market forces.