How to Innovate and Execute

Leaders already know that innovation calls for a different set of activities, skills, methods, metrics, mind-sets, and leadership approaches. And it is well understood that creating a new business and optimizing an already existing one are two fundamentally different management challenges. The real problem for leaders is doing both, simultaneously. How do you meet the performance requirements of the existing business--one that is still thriving--while dramatically reinventing it? How do you envision a change in your current business model before a crisis forces you to abandon it?

Innovation guru Vijay Govindarajan expands the leader's innovation tool kit with a simple and proven method for allocating the organization's energy, time, and resources--in balanced measure--across what he calls the three boxes

- Box 1: The present--Manage the core business at peak profitability
- Box 2: The past--Abandon ideas, practices, and attitudes that could inhibit innovation
- Box 3: The future--Convert breakthrough ideas into new products and businesses

The three-box framework makes leading innovation easier because it gives leaders a simple vocabulary and set of tools for managing and measuring these different sets of behaviors and activities across all levels of the organization. Supported with rich company examples--GE, Mahindra & Mahindra, Hasbro, IBM, United Rentals, and Tata Consultancy Services--and testimonies of leaders who have successfully used this framework, this book solves once and for all the practical dilemma of how to align an organization on the critical but competing demands of innovation.

Two world-renowned experts on innovation and digital strategy explore how real-time data and AI will radically transform physical products--and the companies that make them.

Tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, and Google can collect real-time data from billions of users. For companies that design and manufacture physical products, that type of fluid, data-rich information used to be a pipe dream. Now, with the rise of cheap and powerful sensors, supercomputing, and artificial intelligence, things are changing--fast.

In Fusion Strategy, world-renowned innovation guru Vijay Govindarajan and digital strategy expert Venkat Venkatraman offer a first-of-its-kind playbook that will help industrial companies combine what they do best--create physical products--with what digitals do best--use algorithms and AI to parse expansive, interconnected datasets--to make strategic connections that would otherwise be impossible.

The laws of competitive advantage are changing, rewarding those who have the most robust, data-driven insights rather than the most valuable assets. To compete in the new digital age, companies need to use real-time data to turbocharge their products, strategies, and customer relationships. Those that don't risk falling on the wrong side of the next great digital divide.

Fusion Strategy is the way forward.

A new, comprehensive playbook for innovation from the New York Times bestselling author of Reverse Innovation, Vijay Govindarajan

In his seminal book The Three-Box Solution, Vijay Govindarajan offered an amazingly simple and highly effective framework for leading innovation:

• Execute the present core business at peak efficiency (Box 1)
• Avoid the inhibiting traps of past success (Box 2)
• Build a future day by day through breakthrough innovations (Box 3)

Since the book's publication, companies across the globe have used the three-box framework to great success. Now, along with Manish Tangri, a corporate dealmaker at Intel, Govindarajan goes deeper into the most crucial box of all: creating the future. Together they provide a repeatable process for companies to create new breakthroughs--from ideation through incubation to scaling.

Full of worksheets, exercises, tools, and examples, The Three-Box Solution Playbook is the guide you and your team need to drive innovation and growth--and continually revitalize your company.

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.

How Stella Saved the Farm is a simple parable about making innovation happen, written by the authors of the New York Times bestselling Reverse Innovation: Create Far From Home, Win Everywhere, Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble.

This story resonates in organizations of all types--public sector, private sector, and social sector, from mammoth corporations to small organizations employing just a few dozen people.

The parable is about a farm in trouble. Bankruptcy, or the grim prospect of being acquired by a hostile competitor, threaten. The farm succeeds only if the team pulls together and innovates.

The main characters in the story--Stella, Deirdre, Bull, Mav, Einstein, Rambo, Maisie, and Andrea--are all like people you know, maybe even yourself. The tale includes an unexpected leadership challenge, an ambitious call to action, a bold idea, countless internal obstacles and conflicts, fears, joys, triumphs, and even a love interest.

It's a story that can be enjoyed by anyone. How Stella Saved the Farm delivers eight simple lessons to guide innovation initiatives to success. It prepares business leaders to avoid some of innovation's most toxic myths, teaches how to build the right kind of team, and shows how to learn quickly from experience.

A New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Amazon Bestseller

Reverse Innovation is the new business idea everyone is talking about. Why? Because it presents the blueprint for scaling growth in emerging markets, and importing low-cost and high impact innovations to mature ones.

Innovation is no longer the exclusive domain of the Silicon Valley elite. Reverse Innovation will open your eyes to the fact that the dynamics of global innovation are changing--and if you want your firm to survive, you'd better pay attention. The gap between rich nations and emerging economies is closing. No longer will innovations travel the globe in only one direction, from developed to developing nations. They will also flow in reverse. CEOs of the world's most influential companies agree and have cited Reverse Innovation as their playbook for the next generation of global growth.

Authors Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth explain where, when, and why reverse innovation is on the rise and why the implications are so profound. Learn how to make innovation in emerging markets happen and how such innovations can unlock even greater opportunity throughout the world. You'll follow some of the world's leading companies (including GE, Deere & Company, P&G, and PepsiCo) through stories that illustrate exactly what works and what doesn't.

If you're in a Western economy, you need to accept that the future lies far from home. But the idea is not just for Western audiences. If innovation is at the heart of your company or your career, no matter where you practice business, Reverse Innovation is a phenomenon you need to understand. This book will help you do that.

Even world-class companies, with powerful and proven business models, eventually discover limits to growth. That's what makes emerging high-growth industries so attractive. With no proven formula for making a profit, these industries represent huge opportunities for the companies that are fast enough and smart enough to capture them first. But building tomorrow's businesses while simultaneously sustaining excellence in today's demands a delicate balance. It is a mandatory quest, but one that is fraught with contradiction and paradox. Until now, there has been little practical guidance. Based on an in-depth, multiyear research study of innovative initiatives at ten large corporations, Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble identify three central challenges: forgetting yesterday's successful processes and practices; borrowing selected resources from the core business; and learning how the new business can succeed.The authors make recommendations regarding staffing, leadership roles, reporting relationships, process design, planning, performance assessment, incentives, cultural norms, and much more. Breakthrough growth opportunities can make or break companies and careers. Forget, Borrow, Learn is every leader's guide to execution in unexplored territory.

Health-Care Solutions from a Distant Shore

Health care in the United States and other nations is on a collision course with patient needs and economic reality. For more than a decade, leading thinkers, including Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen, have argued passionately for value-based health-care reform: replacing delivery based on volume and fee-for-service with competition based on value, as measured by patient outcomes per dollar spent.

Though still a pipe dream here in the United States, this kind of value-based competition is already a reality--in India. Facing a giant population of poor, underserved people and a severe shortage of skills and capacity, some resourceful private enterprises have found a way to deliver high-quality health care, at ultra-low prices, to all patients who need it. This book shows how the innovations developed by these Indian exemplars are already being practiced by some far-sighted US providers--reversing the typical flow of innovation in the world.

Govindarajan and Ramamurti, experts in the phenomenon of reverse innovation, reveal four pathways being used by health-care organizations in the United States to apply Indian-style principles to attack the exorbitant costs, uneven quality, and incomplete access to health care. With rich stories and detailed accounts of medical professionals who are putting these ideas into practice, this book shows how value-based delivery can be made to work in the United States. This bottom-up change doesn't require a grand plan out of Washington, DC, agreement between entrenched political parties, or coordination among all players in the health-care system. It needs entrepreneurs with innovative ideas about delivering value to patients. Reverse innovation has worked in other industries. We need it now in health care.