The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge (Harvard Business Review

by Vijay Govindarajan, Chris Trimble

Companies can’t survive without innovating. But most put far more emphasis on generating Big Ideas than on executing them—turning ideas into actual breakthrough products, services, and process improvements.

That’s because “ideating” is energizing and glamorous. By contrast, execution seems like humdrum, behind-the-scenes dirty work. But without execution, Big Ideas go nowhere.

In The Other Side of Innovation, Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble reveal how to execute an innovation initiative—whether a simple project or a grand, gutsy gamble.. Drawing on examples from innovators as diverse as Allstate, BMW, Timberland, and Nucor, the authors explain how to:

• Build the Right Team: Determine who’ll be on the team, where they’ll come from, how they’ll be organized, how much time they’ll devote to the project, and how they’ll navigate the delicate and conflict-rich partnership between innovation and ongoing operations.

• Manage a Disciplined Experiment: Decide how team members can quickly test their assumptions , translate results into new knowledge, and measure progress. Give innovation leaders a tough but fair performance evaluation.

Practical and provocative, this new book takes you step-by-step through the innovation execution process—so your Big Ideas deliver their full promise.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Management, Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Buisness, Startup

240 pages, Hardcover

First published July 13, 2010

About the author

Vijay Govinadrajan is the Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business at the Tuck School at Dartmouth's Center for Global Leadership.

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic must read for anybody doing innovation within a big established company

[Richard Parent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Govidarajan and Trimble set forth step-by-step guides for managing innovation. As they acknowledge, their advice is easy to understand but hard to implement. Nonetheless, it's brilliant stuff.

I came to Govidarajan and Trimble's work through their most recent book, "The 3-Box Solution," which I thought was spot-on and invaluable for understanding why innovation is hard, what it needs to succeed, and why your organization isn't doing it. Yet. "The Other Side of Innovation" is their most detailed book, delving into the nuts and bolts of managing innovation. Highly recommended.

[Yasser · Rating 4 out of 5]

Convinced me that execution is at least as important as the idea and that it's extremely difficult to innovate in an established company. Deliberate org and process changes are needed to enable innovation and it is best done separate from the "performance" org i.e. the part of the company that delivers the quarterly numbers.

[Carolina · Rating 5 out of 5]

É um livro incrível para pessoas que já trabalham de alguma forma com inovação, especialmente dentro de grandes corporações - entra na minha lista de leituras obrigatórias. Mas pode ser um pouco confusa para quem está começando a explorar essa temática, definitivamente não é uma leitura introdutória.

Os autores trazem bastantes exemplos sobre cada princípio explorado, o que em alguns momentos pode parecer repetitivo, mas já no início eles avisam que é um exercício para reforçar os principais pontos. Eles também dizem que as partes I e II podem ser lidas em qualquer ordem, mas eu indico seguir a ordem do livro, justamente por reaproveitarem alguns estudos de caso nas duas partes.

"Cada iniciativa de inovação requer uma equipe com um modelo organizacional próprio e um plano que seja revisado apenas por meio de um rigoroso processo de aprendizado." (p.18)

"Aprender é o processo de transformar previsões especulativas em previsões confiáveis." (p. 113)

"Uma inovação fracassada que gera o aprendizado de lições claras corresponde a um tijolo na construção do futuro. A inovação que não dá certo e é rapidamente esquecida constitui apenas um fracasso" (p. 158)

[Mahesh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many of us have equated innovation to all about ideas and heroics of an individual(s) within an organization. We have many different theories of how to make innovation happen. The Other side of Innovation by Govindarajan and Chris Trimble busts many myths of innovation and proves that the limits to innovation in organizations have everything to do with management capability. The authors bat for keeping the Innovation team distinct from the existing business which they refer to as the performance engine. In the book they outline a fairly detailed process of how to structure and motivate both the innovation team and the performance engine team in order to guarantee success in innovation. Besides the Innovation team, the book stresses the importance of including, rewarding and recognizing the shared staff and the performance engine team (wherever services are utilized) for the success of new initiatives. Many companies and innovation leaders fail miserably at that resulting in failure of new initiatives. Also throughout the book there are concrete examples of many companies who bucked the trend and innovated successfully. This one is a must read!
Comments

[Em Flynn Pesquera · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book, and its real-world examples. It was helpful to see how corporations have approached innovation and created new teams/systems/ways of thinking that is very applicable and translatable for my work. However, this book was exhaustingly redundant, and was written clearly for the too-busy CEO in the way it drove its points home 10x over to make sure we got the point. I would have loved this book had it been 50 pages, instead of 180. But still glad I read it.

[Bob Gao · Rating 4 out of 5]

it looks like this book is exactly talking the "new technologies" team recently setup in our company.

the great point of this book - it is not another book of stage gate process, it talks about setting up a team and how should we run this team

ideas are only beginnings
conflict between innovation and ongoing operation is inevitable

innovation requires a special team and a special plan
run a disciplined experiment

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really insightful and practical look at solving the challenges large organizations face when trying to innovate. A little bit repetitive, but I had quite a few a-ha moments about innovation team structure and evaluation.

[Thomas Brooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good Read. Great case studies for consultants.

[Paweł Skorupiński · Rating 4 out of 5]

Content is very useful. But could be structured around main messages a bit better.

[Sophiepedia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quería que me gustara más, pero no me sentí atraída por el autor.

[Gerardo Penas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Para pensar mucho en el verdadero significado de la Innovación

[Will Knechtle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Conceptually terrific and accurate. If you've studied business or managed ideation and innovation for a few years, my recommendation is to read the Intro and Conclusion then skim the rest.

[Christophe Meyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Painless, insightful reading
Explains how successful companies (many examples) manage:
Innovation Dedicated Team: recruiting, organization, evaluation, learning from prediction errors
Ongoing Performance Engine: sharing resources, without damaging it
Advocates for the creation of a Dedicated Team for each innovation initiative

[Synexe · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE MAIN IDEA

Much of the focus over the last decade or so has focused on the supply-side of innovation. How do you come up with innovative ideas and concepts that you can take to the market. In this excellent book the authors focus instead on the problem of executing innovation. Something of which much less has been written about but which is vitally important for achieving successful innovation.

INTERESTING TIDBIT

The authors co-authored an article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) on frugal innovation with Jeff Immelt, the head of General Electric (GE).

WHAT YOU REALLY NEED TO KNOW

Organizations need to devote specific resources to innovation. But, and herein lies the difference to many others who argue this, these groups need to be embedded and inter-connected to other parts of the other organizations. The reason is that skunk works may not have the connectivity with market intelligence and knowledge of the capacity and capability of their organization as a whole to actualize the ideas that they come up with. That is – they can’t innovate in a vacuum.

THE GENERAL OVERVIEW

Established businesses are generally focused on efficiency – through increased predictability and speed – rather than innovation. But, innovation is unpredictable and messy which is at odds with this other aim. In response to this the authors promote the creation of specific, dedicated innovation centers within organizations that are nonetheless connected and linked in with the other aspects of the organization. And, they ought to be held accountable for their work – although in this case it would be their ability to learn from their mistakes rather than, say, keeping to their budgets.

It’s a great book. The most valuable element it brings though is the author’s corrective on the over-focus that has occurred in recent years on the Start Up as the model for organizational behavior. Start Ups play a valuable role in our organizational ecosystem – but merely one role. There is still a role for more mature an established organizations – albeit one that is changing as the environment in which they operate continues to shift and change – and it is important for us to better understand how to help these types of organizations operate more effectively as they create value in the world. If there is a problem with the book it is that they tend to promote THE answer for the role of execution in innovation – dedicated innovation resource centers – rather than propose that as one example amongst others within the innovation tool box that managers and leaders can utilize to improve their organization’s ability to execute on innovation.

[Book Calendar · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Other Side of Innovation Solving The Execution Challenge by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble.

The Other Side of Innovation is about innovation inside enterprises. It does not cover innovation inside startups. This is a business management book. The authors argue that there are usually two ways to innovate; build special innovation teams or improve on existing products.

Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble argue that for major changes it is important to create special groups of people outside of every day operations. This is because innovating requires different skills and mindset than day to day operations. They make the case that innovation is about learning, experimenting, and taking risks. These are not day to day activities in most corporations.

I found their argument convincing. Where they said innovation occurs inside a corporation is in its "performance engine". It is there that small continuous changes in process and execution can be introduced over time. This has to have more than just ideas and excution, it also has to be accepted by managers or it will not work.

The examples the authors use are from large corportations; Nucor, Fisher-Price, John Deere, Thomson West and other large corporations. The writing is easy to follow; it is in plain english. The book is written for the practitioner. It even includes a set of assessment tools at the end of the book.

There is a Scholarly Foundation section at the end of the book. Like all the content in this book, they justify their choices. They not only give bibliographic citations, they also give reasons why the material was cited. This makes the writing more believable.

This book is a quality business title. It is published by Harvard Business Review Press. Both Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble are faculty at The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. There is a companion website at http://www.theothersideofinnovation.com I plan to read their other book, Ten Rules For Strategic Innovators. It is supposed to be more focused on startups.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Necessary reading for innovators in established businesses. A manual on how I could have avoided a year’s worth of professional mistakes.

Takeaway: the quarterly revenue performance goals from existing lines of business in established companies are necessarily in conflict with innovation. Existing companies generally excel at executing on known business models efficiently (the performance engine).

Innovation is about learning quickly. Unless innovation initiatives are put within a system with resources carved out and a plan for success, you won’t get breakthrough innovation. The performance engine will have all the power and gobble up all the resources until the company finds itself in a place where it has little potential growth left and no new products in the pipeline.

Innovation requires a system comprising resources and a plan, it can’t be left up to individuals to try to make happen on their own. They’ll burn out trying to fight the inertia of the organization.

This book was very helpful in framing this challenge and giving me the language to understand it. However, its prescriptions are so general that they require a lot of customization to any specific case, so I find them hard to put into practice. Zone to Win by Geoff Moore is more practical and actionable. These two books are a good pairing for corporate innovators.

Book cover art is pretty lame.

[Jay Brand · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent insights & suggestions about how to spark innovation within any organization. I'm not certain that the entire prescription outlined in the book would be mandatory given the case studies reviewed, and I'm a fan of "skunk works" and "think tanks"--although intentional links to the rest of the organization are important (e.g., remember Xerox-PARC and MIT Media Lab). Nonetheless, a very important book examining the inherent conflicts between business-as-usual, ongoing operations (the "performance engine") and organizational designs ("dedicated group") and strategies ("partners") to maintain and nurture innovation through the critical execution steps. The "performance engine" corresponds to the less euphemistic "giant hairball."

[Ko Matsuo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book to help move from having an idea to making an idea happen. Helpful discussion about optimizing the roles of the existing Performance Engine of a company and the new Dedicated Team. Pushes for a planning process that includes learning so as to create accountability for non-routine tasks and uncertain outcomes.

An inspiration to enable invention for the future and not just survival for today.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this one for work. It was helpful and relevant to anyone tasked with innovation, with practical advice and pitfalls to avoid. I think the book would benefit from using some of the language that books like The Innovator's Dilemma introduced, to help tie this books concepts to prevalent, related concepts.

[Paul Boger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nothing groundbreaking here, but offers a solid methodology for deciding when when, how, and under what structure to develop new business models and products. They've added some helpful vocabulary to the discussion of corporate innovation, but too many of the examples come from the same 2-3 case studies.

[Sven Meys · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's probably a pretty good guide on innovation for someone who is about to launch such a project.
It is an interesting subject, just not that interesting for me today. But I will keep this book on hand for when the time comes.

So for now I rate this below average, because I could not stay focused while reading it, while there are other books which suck you right in, like blue ocean strategy.

[Pamela · Rating 3 out of 5]

A practical guide for innovators within large companies... had less to do with innovation in smaller firms, which is why I picked it up in the first place, but still a very helpful read for future potential managers

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intelligent and thought-provoking - and concrete enough to be useful. The rare management book I might actually buy to keep for future reference. I know some "leaders" who should have maybe read this first.

[Elizabeth Langston · Rating 4 out of 5]

We are using most of this book as a template for innovation at my company. While I don't agree with everything proposed by the authors, I think the importance of managing the relationship between the Dedicated Team and the Performance Engine cannot be overstated.

[Thomas Burky · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty basic info on the operational processes for conducting innovative development inside an existing company. This is a good companion to the more economic model focused "The Innovator's Solution" I just read.

[Holly Kisly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Practical guide full of great examples. The content will work well for medium to larger firms. I agree with the other reviewer's point that implementation will likely be difficult for small companies.

[Willian Leite · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bom livro, mas quem o miolo sobre os processos e formas de tocar as equipes de desempenho eu acho um pouco repetitivo.

A primeira parte do livro é essencial para quem quer inovar. E logicamente a conclusão final.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent, research-based view of innovation within established companies, written in a straightforward manner. Many business books waste your time with lengthy chapters on simple ideas, simply saying the same things over and over again. This book isn't one of them. I highly recommend it.

[Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everyone working on projects/project management should have this in their shelves. It's main point is that innovation ideas are only beginnings and that the real challenge lies in execution: the dirty work, making innovation happen.