Mr. Vijay Govindarajan has written this to me.
For the last ten years, my partner Chris Trimble and I have studied one critical question: What are the best practices for executing an innovation initiative?
Execution is the poor stepchild of the innovation challenge. People love to engage in the hunt for the big idea, but let's face it, an idea is only a starting point.
We published the article "Stop the Innovation Wars" in the July-August issue of the Harvard Business Review.
The article describes how to build the right team for any innovation initiative, and, critically, how to ensure that it partners with, rather than fights with the established organization.
I hope you will find the article relevant and timely.
It was just an innocent comment. While working with a client at a Fortune 500 company, we proposed the formation of a special group to execute a new growth strategy. “For now, let’s just refer to the group as the innovation team,” we suggested.
The client rolled his eyes. “Let’s call it anything but that,” he said. “What is this so-called innovation team going to do? Brainstorm? Sit around being creative all day? Talk condescendingly about a superior organizational culture? All of this while operating with neither discipline nor accountability? All of this while the rest of us get the real work done?”
Wow. All it took was two words: innovation team.
In our experience, innovation teams feel a hostility toward the people responsible for day-to-day operations that is just as biting. The rich vocabulary of disdain includes bureaucratic, robotic, rigid, ossified, staid, dull, decaying, controlling, patronizing...and just plain old. Such animosity explains why most executives believe that any significant innovation initiative requires a team that is separate and isolated from the rest of the company.
But that conventional wisdom is worse than simpleminded. It is flat wrong. Isolation may neutralize infighting, but it also neuters innovation.
The reality is that an innovation initiative must be executed by a partnership that somehow bridges the hostilities—a partnership between a dedicated team and what we call the performance engine, the unit responsible for sustaining excellence in ongoing operations. Granted, such an arrangement seems, at first glance, improbable. But to give up on it is to give up on innovation itself. Almost all innovation initiatives build directly upon a company’s existing resources and know-how—brands, customer relationships, manufacturing capabilities, technical expertise, and so forth. So when a large corporation asks a group to innovate in isolation, it not only ends up duplicating things it already has but also forfeits its primary advantage over smaller, nimbler rivals—its mammoth asset base.
Over the past decade, we have examined dozens of innovation initiatives and identified some best practices. In the process we built upon foundational management theories such as Jim March’s ideas about balancing exploration with exploitation, and Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch’s argument that firms need to both integrate and differentiate corporate units. We came to the conclusion that the organizational model we prescribe—a partnership between a dedicated team and the performance engine—is surprisingly versatile. It can be adapted to initiatives that span many innovation categories—sustaining and disruptive; incremental and radical; competence enhancing and competence destroying; new processes, new products, new businesses, and high-risk new ventures.
Vijay Govindarajan (vg@dartmouth.edu) is the Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business and founding director of the Center for Global Leadership at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. He was General Electric’s first professor in residence and chief innovation consultant.
Chris Trimble (chris.trimble@dartmouth.edu) is on the faculty at Tuck and is an expert on innovation within established organizations. Govindarajan and Trimble are the authors of The Other Side of Innovation—Solving the Execution Challenge (Harvard Business Review Press, 2010).
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