Payback: Reaping the Rewards of Innovation

by James P. Andrew, Harold L. Sirkin, John Butman

If you're like most people, you bet your career and company on innovation--because you must. Reaping the Rewards of Innovation offers you a new way to think about and manage innovation that will dramatically improve the odds of success.Authors James Andrew and Harold Sirkin, senior partners in The Boston Consulting Group, describe an approach to managing innovation based on the concept of a cash curve--which tracks investment against time. They ask the questions you need to How much should you invest in a new product or service? How fast should you push it to market? How quickly can you get to optimal value? How much additional investment should you pour into sustaining and building the product or service?Payback offers you practical and economically sound advice on when to pursue cash flow indirectly by first pursuing other benefits, such as brand and knowledge. It also shows you how to reshape the cash curve by using different business models--integrator, orchestrator, and licenser--each of which balances risk and reward differently.The authors then present a short list of decisions and activities that you must make--not delegate--to achieve a high return on innovation. You won't find facile answers in Payback--but you will find valuable insights and practical guidance for mastering one of the most challenging and critical business innovation.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Management

228 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Fernando · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's an okay book. The innovation framework presented is elegant and straightforward, and encapsulates the main elements for discussion pretty well. It's nothing mind-blowing but it's well structured. The book drags too much when diving deep into each element of the framework, which is to be expected, otherwise the book could have been an article (and that's why it gets 3 instead of 5 stars).

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a selection for the Federal News Radio Book Club

The book is great if you are concerned about innovation -- and you think it is just brainstorming or chance. There is a process -- and Jim Andrew talks about ensuring that innovation has a return on investment.

A great read these days when there is so much pressure to be innovative.

[Nora · Rating 3 out of 5]

The power of this book lies in the last three chapters, where it discusses how to improve payback, after explaining what payback is and what the different innovation business models are. Easy to read, pragmatic. The only downside is that it's written by consultants, not practitioners, so sometimes seems a bit distant from the messiness of what it's like in practice.

[Brent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book about turning the process of innovation from black magic into a measurable process.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading for the Federal News Radio Book Club in July