“It is not enough to be busy,” opined Henry David Thoreau, “so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?” The great E. O. Wilson might suggest that Thoreau knew very little about ants and their numerous benefits to life on Earth, but we don’t need to get bogged down in that at the moment. I mean, sure, ants eat harmful insects, aerate the soil, and help disperse nutrients and seeds, all of which help plants grow and proliferate. They can also lift 50 times their body weight, which is pretty badass. But putting that work into perspective and making a conscious decision to do it differently? That is the domain of human innovation and creativity, and the foundation of our civilization. 

The best Innovation & Creativity books of the year are what we are busy about. From entrepreneurship to AI, idea-generation to the power of storytelling, these 10 books all help us consider our place in the ongoing project of humanity's progress, where and how we might backslide (or where we already are in some respects), and how our individual work contributes to the shape of our collective future.

Excerpts from the Best Innovation & Creativity Books of 2025

• Could Should Might Don't: How We Think About the Future by Nick Foster, MCD  
  
• The Creative Shift: How to Power Up Your Organization by Making Space for New Ideas by Andrew Robertson, Basic Venture  
  
• Digital Culture Shock: Who Creates Technology and Why This Matters by Katharina Reinecke, Princeton University Press 
  
• The Future of Storytelling: How Immersive Experiences Are Transforming Our World by Charles Melcher, Artisan  
  
• The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny by Laura Bates, Sourcebooks  
  
• Pioneers: 8 Principles of Business Longevity from Immigrant Entrepreneurs by Neri Karra Sillaman, Wiley  
  
• Raising AI: An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Future by De Kai, The MIT Press  
  
• The Storyteller's Advantage: How Powerful Narratives Make Businesses Thrive by Christina Farr, Basic Venture  
  
• The Sweaty Startup: How to Get Rich Doing Boring Things by Nick Huber, Harper Business  
  
• The Uncanny Muse: Music, Art, and Machines from Automata to AIEx by David Hajdu, W. W. Norton & Company 

These books all show us that humans have the ability to be more than contributors to the whole, more than passive consumers of the proceeds of our collective labor, more than ants. We have agency and the ability to change—not just ourselves but our future, and our children’s futures. We have even come up with ingenious ways to lift far more than 50 times our body weight and have been doing so since we built Stonehenge, the pyramids of Giza, and Teotihuacán. In the same way that E. O. Wilson considered himself to be an intellectual successor to Thoreau, even if he knew far more about the work of ants than Thoreau did, we are all heirs to that legacy of human innovation and creativity, even if we know more about the movement of the heavenly bodies that those structures were erected to mirror here on Earth. The question is, What will we build next? Each book in the Innovation & Creativity category helps answer that question.