Beyond the Idea: Simple, Powerful Rules for Successful Innovation

Innovating while maintaining optimum performance is a balancing act for any company. It requires good planning, tough decisions, and careful management. How many staff members do you assign to innovation? How do you ensure innovation doesn't interfere with day-to-day operations? How do you evaluate the leaders of new projects? And how do you manage tensions between the brainstormers and those responsible for keeping the main engine of the business running smoothly?

If you're looking for the answers to these and similar questions, this book is for you. "Beyond the Idea" provides a road map for individuals and organizations that want to bring great concepts to market, while not putting their overall performance in jeopardy. It offers precise guidelines and proven techniques to help companies innovate across the board – from small projects that require minimal resources to big, breakthrough ideas.

This book is written for anyone who's in charge of making innovation happen – from the CEO to team leaders, and from project managers to outside consultants. It's best suited to those in fairly big organizations, when there's room to assign time and people to special projects. But its theories are also relevant to entrepreneurs working with small teams.

The concepts in "Beyond the Idea" are based on more than a decade of research. The book's authors are among the world's top experts on successfully managing innovation.

Vijay Govindarajan, known as VG, is the Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He was the first Professor in Residence and Chief Innovation Consultant at General Electric and wrote the New York Times bestseller "Reverse Innovation." You can hear an Expert Interview podcast with VG on the Mind Tools site.

Chris Trimble is also on the faculty at Tuck. He's advised dozens of big-name corporations and co-authored "Reverse Innovation," "How Stella Saved the Farm," and two other books with Govindarajan.

So keep listening to find out how to match the right execution model to your idea, how to build a dedicated team to bring your ideas to market, and how to design a plan that supports disciplined experimentation.

Thomas Edison said that genius is one percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration. But too many organizations allocate all their time, energy, and resources to the genius side of the equation – and they neglect the execution side.

That's not surprising. It's easy to get excited about great ideas, to imagine how they'll dazzle your competitors or delight your customers. But turning a concept into a product or service that's ready to roll out to clients isn't quite so much fun – it can be a long, hard slog.

Too many businesses assume idea generation and execution are one and the same. Others think innovation isn't too different from everyday performance. If you think like this, you're mistaken, and there could be trouble ahead. Not only will you struggle to get your ideas off the ground, but you could also damage your business by misallocating resources or causing divisions among team members.

"Beyond The Idea" provides a step-by-step guide to avoid this kind of strife and it does so in an easy-to-read, compact package. In fact, the authors designed this book to be read in a single sitting.

While "Beyond the Idea" expands on some of their previous theories, they accept that readers familiar with their other work may find little in the way of new thinking here. Their goal was to reach a wider audience by distilling their theories into a minimalist toolkit. There's a danger some readers will be left wanting more, while others may be disappointed there are no big advances. But we think the authors have done a good job of getting their theories across without overloading us with information, even if the content lacks color.

We also like the fact the authors cater for organizations of different sizes. They offer three models for innovation, depending on the resources a business has to allocate to new projects.

We're going to take a look at these three models, but bear in mind we haven't time to cover the ins and outs of each approach here.

First, though, it's important to get clear on what we mean by innovation. The authors say the term ‘innovation' can be applied to any project that's new to your organization and has an uncertain outcome. By definition, innovation is a risky business, and it's also in conflict with what the authors call the "performance engine" – a company's day-to-day operations.

That's why it's so important to choose the right model for your business and your particular project.

The simplest, least ambitious model for innovation is Model S – where S stands for small. This is where innovation is squeezed into any slack in the system. As you can imagine, this model is only useful for small projects. It also relies heavily on front-line employees going the extra mile and being really motivated.

There are a few approaches to this model: you can ask team members to find time to be an innovator around their normal work, you can ask a small group of people to give all their time to innovation, or you can come up with a combination of the two.

But Model S has limitations – not the least the fact there are only twenty-four hours in a day. You can stretch these limitations, by deliberately overstaffing, for example. Take the Google model: employees are encouraged to spend 20 percent of their time in pursuit of new ideas. But not all firms can afford to do this and even if they could, this approach would only produce small innovations.

If you're looking for repeated and predictable innovation success, Model R is the way forward – where R stands for Repeatable. Think about Apple – its first iPhone was a smash hit. Then the company deftly brought out a series of improved models.

If motivation is the key to Model S performance, process is the secret to striking gold with Model R. If you can build a process that's efficient, routine, and easily replicable, you can plan and budget for new releases and bring a series of innovations to market with minimal disruption. This model works well for companies that produce consumer electronics, appliances, or vehicles.

Model R has limitations too, the biggest one being project similarity. The more efficient the process, the more inflexible it becomes – it's likely new innovations will be only marginally different from previous ones. This is perfect if all you want to do is produce a better version of last year's product. But if you want to shake things up more, you'll need a different approach.

If your initiatives are too big for Model S and too individual for Model R, you're going to need to adopt Model C, where C stands for Custom. In this model, you separate innovation tasks from day-to-day operations to produce one unique initiative at a time. The authors focus the rest of the book on Model C, which is the most ambitious, but also the most potentially damaging to the performance engine if not managed correctly.

Model C requires a special team and a special plan, so let's look at how to put these together.

In Model C, the authors refer to employees who are engaged full-time in innovation as "the dedicated team." They have free rein and full flexibility to work exclusively on the innovation project. Part-time innovators are called ‘shared staff', since they take on selective innovation tasks, but must also keep the main performance engine running smoothly.

Managing the relationship between dedicated team members and shared staff can be tricky and the authors point out the common pitfalls. It's also important to create a dedicated team that's right for the job. To do this, first list the skills the dedicated team will need. That's right – list the skills, not the names of the people you think should be on the team.

Next, hire people to match those skills. This can be done by transferring employees internally, hiring from the outside, or even buying other companies.

The final step is to develop an organizational model that's customized to the task at hand. This includes looking at job roles, hierarchy, and culture.

This may sound a bit like creating a new company, but that's the idea. It's about breaking with existing organizational structures to allow people the freedom to get creative. Getting the right mix can be challenging – and you need to strike a good balance between insiders and outsiders. Outsiders bring new skills, challenge assumptions, and break down existing work relationships to allow space for new ones to be built from scratch. Insiders are important too, particularly to manage the partnership with the shared staff.

To shake things up further, it's a good idea to make up new job titles, instead of recycling old ones, and to put different people in charge, rather than sticking with existing hierarchies. Also, think about giving your dedicated team its own culture and policies. The idea is to come up with something unique and quite different to the performance engine.

So, we have a special team. Now we need a unique plan. Innovation is, by nature, experimental, but we need boundaries around our experiments so we don't harm existing operations.

The authors offer some guiding principles to support a culture of disciplined experimentation. To create a Model C plan, you need to start with a blank page. Performance engine plans look similar from one year to the next – they have budgets, targets, and performance metrics that can be replicated each cycle. With Model C, starting from scratch breaks with the past practice and encourages innovation.

Another principle of Model C innovation is to discuss lessons learned in a separate forum, rather than in a meeting where the performance engine is also on the agenda. There are a few reasons for this. When performance engine initiatives fall behind, the goal is to get them back on track. With innovation projects, it could be you were on the wrong track to begin with.

Also, innovations need to be assessed using different criteria to those used for the performance engine. Remember the definition of innovation? It's a new project with an uncertain outcome, so trying to measure results by standard timescales or existing performance targets will hamper progress. And it's likely the numbers produced by new projects will be small at the start, which means they'll probably get lost among the more impressive figures discussed at big business meetings.

The authors also suggest that those working on an innovation project should meet frequently. Unlike with the performance engine, you'll need to review the project and potentially shift course at more regular intervals.

Finally, to get disciplined experiments right you'll need to make a big investment of time and energy. But that's hard to do when the results are uncertain. Plus, business leaders have a tendency to allocate time in proportion to the size of a budget, which means innovation projects that start small are in danger of getting little attention. A good rule of thumb is to allocate time based on a project's potential impact on the bottom line or long-term growth.

So how do you know if you're spending the right amount of time on an innovation, when they take time to bear fruit? Well, instead of trying to measure performance, ask if the project is moving in the right direction. If it is, give it more time.

The authors also offer some great tips on how to deal with tensions between dedicated innovation teams and shared staff, how to ensure shared staff do their bit for the innovation project, and how to evaluate leaders of innovation initiatives. Plus, they include a few really useful appendices on strategy and change.

But we should point out there are things the authors don't include. For example, there are no detailed case studies in this book, unlike in some of their other works. As you heard at the start, the authors have stripped things back in "Beyond the Idea" to create a quick and easy read. They mention companies in passing – Apple, BMW, and Dow Jones, for example – but if you're looking for in-depth case studies, you'll have to refer back to their earlier books or look elsewhere.

This does mean "Beyond the Idea" lacks color and is a little dry. It's not a book you'll turn to for pleasure on a Sunday afternoon. Rather, it's a practical, theory-based manual that gives you the tools you need to get from the brainwave stage to execution.

"Beyond the Idea" by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble is published in the U.S. by St Martin's Press and in the U.K. by Macmillan.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.