In software engineering one of the cornerstone books is "Design Patterns" written by "the gang of four" (Gamma, Johnson, Helm and Vlissides). This book describes a series of high level structures or approaches that all well written software is based on. If you want to write good code you base your strategy on one of the approaches in this book. At the recent "Emerging Technology Conference" Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Publishing and sponsor of the conference present what he called "Design Patterns for Innovation". While some of this focuses on open source software and the internet there are concepts that can be applied to all innovation. So check out this summary of the presentation and the slides. By the way you can recognize the O'Reilly books because most of them have a picture of an animal on the cover. Here is the one that seems to be Tim's favorite.