In The Other Side of Innovation, the authors offer practical advice for senior executives, chief innovation officers, leaders of innovation initiatives, members of innovation teams, aspiring innovators, and all those who support innovation. The principles and recommendations in the book span the full spectrum of innovation initiatives—from small process improvements to high-risk new ventures.
A fundamental premise underlying the book is that each innovation initiative needs a special kind of team and a special kind of plan. Part I of The Other Side of Innovation focuses on the team; Part II focuses on the plan.
In Part I Govindarajan and Trimble explain the steps for building the project team:
•Divide the labor. Decide how responsibilities for executing the innovation initiative will be split between the two components of the project team: The Dedicated Team, which works on the initiative full time; and the Shared Staff, who work on the initiative part time while maintaining ongoing operations.•Assemble the Dedicated Team. Determine who will serve on the Dedicated Team and how to define their roles and responsibilities.•Manage the partnership. Establish clear expectations for each partner and mediate the inevitable conflicts that will arise between the two.In Part II they examine three steps for planning an innovation initiative and evaluating its progress:
•Formalize the experiment. The basic principles for learning from experiments are familiar but hard to follow.•Break down the hypothesis. All but the simplest innovation initiatives are really compound experiments. There are two or more uncertain conjectures.•Seek the truth. Myriad pressures in organizations push people toward interpretations of results that are comfortable and convenient rather than analytical and dispassionate. These pressures must be understood and overcome.The Other Side of Innovation is the essential guidebook for making innovation happen
10 RULES FOR STRATEGIC INNOVATORS
How to Build a Breakthrough New Business within a Profitable Old One
Even world-class companies with successful business models eventually hit the ceiling on growth. That’s what makes emerging industries so attractive. These markets represent huge opportunities for capturing long term growth and competitive advantage. But because they lack a proven formula for making a profit, they are risky and expensive—with dire consequences for failure.
Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble argue that every organization’s survival depends on strategic experiments that target such untested markets, but few firms understand how to implement them successfully. Too many managers think that a great idea is enough to get them from business plan to profitability, but somewhere in the middle of the innovation process, most organizations stumble. In Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators, Govindarajan and Trimble reveal where firms go wrong on their journey from idea to execution—and outline exactly what it takes to build a breakthrough business while sustaining excellence in an existing one.
Based on an in-depth, multiyear research study of innovative initiatives at ten large corporations, Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble identify three central challenges to strategic innovation:
› Forgetting some key assumptions that made the current business
successful
› Borrowing assets from the established organization to fuel the new one
› Learning how to succeed in an emerging and uncertain market
The authors illustrate ten rules to help organizations overcome these challenges, and show how firms must rewire their “organizational DNA” across four main areas: staffing, structure, systems, and culture, in order for a promising new venture to succeed. They also spell out the critical role senior executives must play in managing the inevitable tensions that arise between today’s business and tomorrow’s.
Breakthrough growth opportunities can make or break companies and careers. Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators is every leader’s guide to execution in unexplored territory.