New Book Provides a Unified Mental Model for Understanding, Analyzing, and Creating Innovation—No MBA Required
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA – 08 March 2026 – Innovation is often treated as a mystical event reserved for genius inventors or reduced to a buzzword in corporate presentations. In his latest book, Quick Innovation MBA: Innovation Unlocked: What It Is, Why It Works, and How to Do It — A First-Principles Guide, innovation theorist and entrepreneur Tiisetso Maloma dismantles these myths and provides a coherent, practical framework for understanding how new things actually come into being.
Released by Bula Buka Publishers, Quick Innovation MBA is the culmination of over a decade of research, writing, and teaching. The book synthesizes concepts from Maloma’s previous works—including Innovate the Next, Money Is Biological, and Future of Township Economies—into a single, comprehensive guide for entrepreneurs, students, policymakers, and anyone seeking to navigate a rapidly evolving world.
At the heart of the book is a powerful, demystifying definition: innovation is the fusion of two or more existing things to create a new configuration that is effective in serving a human purpose and demonstrates agility—faster, cheaper, smaller, or easier than what came before.
“This book is not a collection of theories but a synthesis of the core frameworks I’ve developed and tested over years,” said Maloma. “The goal is empowerment: to give readers a lens through which they can deconstruct any product, service, or technology—from a new app to a breakthrough in renewable energy—and understand not just what it is, but why it emerged when it did, and what might come next.”
The book introduces several frameworks, including:
The Adjacent Possible: A map of what can feasibly be built from the components and platforms available at any given moment. Innovation moves stepwise into these adjacent rooms—you cannot leapfrog to a destination for which the building blocks don’t yet exist.
The Human Greed Pyramid: A seven-layer model illustrating how innovation must resonate with deep-seated human drives—from survival and status to curiosity and belonging—to achieve adoption.
Stacking for Agility: A practical method for generating ideas by combining established utilities with mature platforms (e.g., video entertainment + internet = YouTube).
The Novel Human Resource: A framework for developing the combinatorial skill stack required to see connections that specialists in any single domain might miss.
Drawing on evolutionary biology, the book argues that innovation behaves like a living system—adapting, mutating, and being selected by its environment. It explores how exaptation (co-opting a technology for a new use) and convergence (the merging of separate technologies) drive the accelerated change of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The book also grounds its principles in specific contexts, including a chapter on township innovation that demonstrates how constraint breeds a distinct form of agility, with lessons for the global formal economy.
Quick Innovation MBA does not ground its arguments in statistical metrics. Maloma argues that innovation is a non-ergodic, path-dependent domain where the past does not reliably predict the future. Instead, the book provides perception-enhancing frameworks that generate questions and guide action where data cannot go.
“The future does not belong to those who wait for change, but to those who understand how to create it,” said Maloma. “This book equips readers to think independently, recognize where value is forming, and deliberately pursue pathways that expand their capability, relevance, and future potential.”
The book includes a bonus section: the Innovation Design Model (IDM), a practical workshop-in-print developed with Startup Picnic Academy, featuring step-by-step exercises and worksheets to move readers from theory to practice.
The book is making its way to national bookstores such as Exclusive Books, Bargain Books, and Takealot. It is also available on Amazon.For media inquiries, interview requests, or review copies, please contact Bula Buka Publishers.
About the Author:
Tiisetso Maloma is an author, innovation theorist, IP entrepreneur, and award-winning publisher whose work focuses on innovation systems, emerging markets, and the future of value creation.
He is the originator of Ubuntu Stoicism and has authored over ten books, including Forget the Business Plan Use This Short Model and Innovate Like Elon Musk. Over the past decade, he has worked with institutions including the Obama Foundation, Wits Business School, Standard Bank, and The Innovation Hub. He is the founder of VentureBooks ERP-OS, an AI-enabled publishing infrastructure venture aimed at increasing the global reach of African-authored books.