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    Beyond the Idea: How to Execute Innovation in Any Organization
    Beyond the Idea: How to Execute Innovation in Any Organization
    Beyond the Idea: How to Execute Innovation in Any Organization
    Ebook171 pages2 hours

    Beyond the Idea: How to Execute Innovation in Any Organization

    By Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble

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    About this ebook

    The New York Times bestselling authors of Reverse Innovation and How Stella Saved the Farm distill more than a decade of exclusive research into one short, powerful, action-oriented book.

    Companies stumble when they imagine that innovation is mostly about ideas. The reality is that ideas are only beginnings. Indeed, even a company with the world's best idea still faces a devilish challenge: it must build the business of tomorrow without endangering the business of today.

    Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble are the world's leading authorities on the successful management of innovation. In Beyond the Idea, they distill more than a decade of research and insight into a practical, accessible, read-at-one-sitting handbook that offers invaluable guidance for anyone charged with making innovation happen: executives, managers, consultants, project leaders, and teams.

    By offering specific action steps, Beyond the Idea extends the elegant conceptual insights from How Stella Saved the Farm, Govindarajan and Trimble's parable. Beyond the Idea shows exactly how to:

    - Build a team with a very particular structure, one that makes it possible to simultaneously build something new and sustain what exists.

    - Manage any innovation initiative as a disciplined experiment.

    - Implement three distinct models for moving from ideas to action.

    Beyond the Idea is an essential book for any business that recognizes that innovation always has been, and always will be, the key to long term growth and vitality.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateSep 24, 2013
    ISBN9781466835412
    Author

    Vijay Govindarajan

    Vijay Govindarajan is the Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business and founding director of the Tuck School's Center for Global Leadership. He was the first professor in residence and chief innovation consultant at General Electric. He has worked with many Fortune 500 corporations and is a regular keynote speaker in CEO forums and major conferences around the world. As well as How Stella Saved the Farm, Govindarajan has co-authored two other business books with Chris Trimble: the international bestseller Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators and The Other Side of Innovation.

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      Book preview

      Beyond the Idea - Vijay Govindarajan

      PREFACE

      Thomas Edison said it over a century ago: Genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration.

      Unfortunately, no one listened. When companies launch innovation initiatives, they typically allot almost all of their time and energy to that initial 1 percent—the thrilling hunt for the breakthrough idea. The real innovation challenge, however, lies beyond the idea. It lies in a long, hard journey—from imagination to impact.

      Even the best-managed corporations in the world struggle to execute innovation initiatives. This challenge, which we call the other side of innovation, is widely misunderstood. Some companies conflate this side and the other side, believing it is all the same. Others imagine that executing an innovation initiative can’t be much different than executing day-to-day operations. Both views are wrong. Innovation execution is neither innovation nor execution. It is its own unique beast.

      Since the fall of 2000, we have been deeply immersed in studying just this one topic. Along the way, we have produced three books. The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge (2010) was a general treatment of all innovation initiatives; Reverse Innovation: Create Far from Home, Win Everywhere (2012) examined the specific challenge of innovating to serve customers in the rapidly growing emerging economies; and Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators: From Idea to Execution (2005) focused on high-risk but high-growth potential new ventures inside established organizations.

      Along the way, we have both spent an enormous amount of time on the road, giving speeches, making presentations, and delivering workshops to as wide a range of industries as possible. We very often hear things like: I couldn’t agree with what you are saying any more thoroughly. But I really need you to spread the word to my colleagues. (If we only had a nickel for each time we’ve heard this request!)

      There is, of course, a limit to how many people we can reach by boarding airplanes and making presentations. There are just the two of us. And yet, we’ve seen that in order for a company to achieve innovation success, a lot of people have to understand what to do. One person is not enough; ten working on the same innovation challenge is closer to the mark.

      Traditional business books, however, have limitations that prevent them from reaching high concentrations of people in a single organization. Why? Number one on the list: People are extremely busy. We are very proud of the clarity and readability of our prior books, but we understand that each takes several hours and several sittings to read. Many executives simply don’t have that kind of time.

      Therefore, this year, we published two books. Our favorite attribute of both of these books is that they are short.

      Earlier in 2013, we published How Stella Saved the Farm: A Tale About Making Innovation Happen. It is a simple parable about a farm in trouble and how the farm innovates to get out of trouble. Though we don’t pretend to have matched his literary achievement, we wrote Stella in the spirit of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. It is a story about animals who run their own farm; it is also a light read with a very serious intent. Though Stella takes only about an hour to read, it still delivers the most fundamental principles at the core of The Other Side of Innovation. (To multiply Stella’s impact, we have developed related tools, discussion guides, and workshops, in partnership with the International Thought Leader Network. Please visit Stella’s website: howstellasavedthefarm.com.)

      In Beyond the Idea, our intent is to convey Here’s what you should do and Here’s why it works in the most direct, clear, and compact way possible. We’ve provided readers a much greater level of specificity than was possible in Stella, but we’ve nonetheless kept this book concise.

      This book includes several critical expansions beyond The Other Side of Innovation. Chapters 2, 3, 5, and 9 include new ideas that we now know are critical for gaining buy-in and understanding. That said, readers of our past books may feel that they’ve read much of what’s in these pages before. This is a reasonable reaction. We hope that Beyond the Idea’s primary impact is not in its intellectual advance, but in its accessibility. Indeed, we hope that the book’s brevity will help push the management profession one step closer to a state of sophistication wherein practices for managing all forms of innovation are as well understood and systematically practiced as those for quality improvement; as frequently talked about as TQM and Six Sigma.

      To slim Beyond the Idea down to its very compact format, we’ve had to make some choices. Most critically, we’ve chosen to eliminate the detailed examples that are the hallmarks of our past works. We know that rich examples make concepts more concrete for many readers. We ask such readers to consider reading Beyond the Idea in conjunction with Stella, which is actually a composite of dozens of case studies we’ve written over the years. Indeed, every detail in Stella, save those obviously intended to amuse, are drawn from real observations at real companies. Alternatively, there are many examples in our past books and articles, and all of our case studies are freely available on the website for The Other Side of Innovation, theothersideofinnovation.com. We do use a select handful of brief company examples in Beyond the Idea. All are drawn either from these case studies or from interviews with company executives. There is one exception, Toyota. Here, we drew heavily from Steven J. Spear and H. Kent Bowen’s Harvard Business Review article, Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System (September

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