 Fast Innovation
by Michael L. George, James Works, and Kimberly Watson-Hemphill
McGraw-Hill, 2005
Foreword by Clayton M. Christensen, author of The Innovators Dilemma, The Innovators Solution, and Seeing What's Next
Overview
Book Review from Harvard Business School Working Knowledge
Corporate Leadership on Fast Innovation
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Fast Innovation Overview
"How can I create an innovation engine that will consistently deliver substantial organic growth?"
This question is the number-one issue for most CEOs and senior executives today. Innovation is a critical driver of organic growth, yet based on the authors' research, only a small percent of companies know how to effectively use innovation to sustain long-term, profitable growth. And the stakes couldn't be higher -- failure to create successful new products, services, and business models causes stagnating or declining profits.
Now, for the first time, experts Michael George, James Works and Kimberly Watson-Hemphill explain the surprising and significant gap between the CEO's growth goals and actual performance. The authors, who are experts at connecting strategy to execution, give you a complete blueprint for exploiting the strategic and operational dimensions of innovation. Using fresh insights about the true drivers of fast time-to-market and the inadequate success rate of innovation, Fast Innovation reveals:
- Why current approaches to innovation fail
- A new strategic and tactical plan that will help your company dramatically reduce time-to-market by 50 to 80 percent
- The secret for finding out what your customers really want (not just what they say they want)
- Tools and methods for turning customer insights into ideas that will generate significant ROI
- The key levers that senior leadership must engage to create innovation capability across the business
You'll receive specific actionable solutions for driving disruptive and sustaining innovation at the strategic, portfolio and project level. You'll also learn how to improve how much time your innovation teams actually spend innovating, and discover the changes that must be launched at the corporate level in order to enable the whole business to embrace and get results from this approach.
Book Review - Harvard Business School Working Knowledge
Frankly, we've grown a little weary of the flood of books on innovation let loose by HBS professor Clayton Christensen's groundbreaking The Innovator's Dilemma. We all understand that we need to innovate in order to grow, that we need to do it on a sustainable basis, and that such innovation must be part of the organization's fabric, not a bolted-on Department of Creativity. So it was with some weariness that we picked up Fast Innovation.
But we are happy to report that this work has some new things many of the other books don't, starting with a foreword by the aforementioned Christensen. According to the authors, "This is the first book to provide quantitative methods such that a CEO or manager can know that the innovation process will both meet its required delivery date and create a differential offering with a high probability of success."
The authors propose that companies adopt three innovation imperatives:
- Differentiation: "Providing an offering, a process, a business model, or a set of offerings which the customer believes deliver superior performance per unit of cost."
- Fast time-to-market: "Consistently reaching the market early enough such that differentiated offerings can earn high margins, and quickly creating a new innovation to counter the inevitable commoditization of the old."
- Disruptive innovations: "Creating and embracing disruptive offerings to obsolete current offerings, processes, and business models will catch the competition flat-footed and may provide great propulsive power to growth."
The book's look at fast time-to-market is perhaps its most meaty contribution. Time and cost overruns top the CEO frustration list when it comes to the innovation process. So how to get faster? For one thing, innovation is best done with plenty of breathing room. Citing the Law of Lead Time (Little's Law), which suggests that the more active projects you have the longer it will take to complete all of them, the authors implore executives to flush out the pipeline, as GE did when it cut 1,000 research projects down to twenty that could be seen to contribute in three to five years.
The book proposes a strategic and tactical plan that it claims will help companies shorten time-to-market by 50 percent to 80 percent.
Of all the innovation books we've read post-Christensen, this one does the best at speaking the language of the CEO and other top executives, and includes examples where CEOs had to step in to ensure successful disruptive innovation took place. (Tip: Consider hiring a chief innovation officer.)
All three authors are consultants, and Michael George wrote Lean Six Sigma.
- Sean Silverthorne
Link to review
Corporate Leadership on Fast Innovation
"My understanding of innovation has been enlarged through my interactions with Mike. I am grateful that in the writing of this book Mike has relied upon my research and that I have similarly been able to build upon his understanding. I thank him for providing all of us with the set of practical implementation tools presented in this book."
CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN, Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, author of The Innovators Dilemma, The Innovators Solution, and Seeing What's Next
"Growth through innovation is key to Eli Lilly and Company. To serve our commitment to meeting medical needs and achieve our growth goals requires more innovation, faster innovation and, at the same time, less resource consumption and risk. This book identifies some of the significant changes in strategy and tactics needed for an innovation process to achieve these goals. Every executive concerned with the changing business of innovation would do well to become familiar with the principles contained in this book."
ALPHEUS BINGHAM, Vice President, Lilly Research Laboratories Strategy, Eli Lilly and Company
"Texas Instruments recognizes the importance of creating highly differentiated products with faster time to market as the driver of profitable growth. In this book, you will receive the strategic insight and the practical tool set needed to significantly improve your company's rate of successful innovations. I encourage every executive who is interested in accelerating the growth of his business to read this book."
EMERY POWELL, New Product Development, Texas Instruments Inc.
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