A mental hug with little relevance for firms grappling with recession

BOOK REVIEW: The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challengeby Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble: Harvard Business Review Press; $29.95 (€22)

FEW WOULD argue with the view that innovation is important in healthcare, education, energy, sustainability and the myriad challenges facing the world. Exploring the nature of innovation is a growth industry – certainly as an area of academic interest and increasingly as a practical activity that attracts attention and resources.

Managing expectations and resources associated with innovation is inherently risky in terms of both the processes and the uncertainty of outcomes. In an Irish context, Nama is an innovation – important, inherently risky and with uncertain outcomes.

A book devoted to exploring how innovation "delivers" (the focus of Govindarajan's and Trimble's book) is therefore intuitively appealing. Even more so when one discovers that it is the result of a reported 10-year research exercise and the stable mate of a previous recommended read by the same authors ( Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators – From Idea to Execution(2005)).

Even the table of contents grabs the attention, with chapter titles such as "Divide the Labor" and "Seek the Truth". Whilst catchy, such wording is reminiscent of Shannon Tweed's character in the Frasiercomedy episode where she plays Dr Honey Snow, prolific author of self-help books. It's perhaps one of the book's strengths – simple, commonsense insights derived from real world experience.

In 169 pages, the authors synthesise the outcomes of interviews with mainly US-based corporate executives to conclude with a series of principles and recommendations offered as “practical new advice for senior executives, chief innovation officers, leaders of innovation initiatives, members of innovation teams, aspiring innovators, and those that support innovation”.

The crux of the book is that “most companies have plenty of creativity and plenty of technology. What they lack are the managerial skills to convert ideas into practice.”

In essence, the argument centres on what the authors identify as fundamental incompatibilities within most companies – between the need for repeatable/predicable operations; and the need for innovation initiatives that are inherently non-routine and with uncertain outcomes. A central idea in the book is the distinction between what is labelled the “performance engine model” responsible for repeatable and predicable operations within companies; and a “custom organisation model” responsible for pursuing a particular innovation initiative. Managing the interaction between these two models is purported to be the key to success.

In a scene-setting preamble, Govindarajan and Trimble suggest “the story of ideas about management begins at roughly the start of the twentieth century . . . back then management thinking was rooted in experiences in factories, railroads, and assembly lines. People were viewed as mere components in the machinery of production.”

The authors further trace the evolution of management thinking to the issue of management as strategy and, more recently, of strategy as innovation.

The research mission underpinning the book is stated as “to learn by studying a variety of innovation endeavours in a variety of contexts, to generalize, and to prescribe”. Central to the research is the reported library of cases generated between 2000 and 2010. Scrutiny of the associated website (www.theothersideofinnovation.com) reveals an interesting corpus of about 40 cases, with many in the style of personalised management scenarios, such as “Upon buying EBI, Jacob Safra soon disbanded the company’s door-to-door sales force” and associated innovation-related questions for classroom discussion. Roughly half the cases were written in the three years centred on 2002 with a further tranche of 15 written in 2007.

The value of the cases is not the content per se but as the basis for classroom discussion and as such would be of limited value to the intrepid innovator. One also wonders if the proposed principles and recommendations of innovation apply equally to companies operating in periods of recession.

The book has a two-part structure that reflects an “organise” and “plan” prescription proposed as the answer to the successful implementation of a single innovation initiative.

Part one emphasises team-building and the need for partnerships within a company. That partnership consists of a project team – those dedicated to the innovation initiative – together with staff from the ongoing operations side of the company.

Part two’s “planning” focus conceptualises innovation as an experiment and suggests the need for such experiments to be evaluated in terms of formalised learning.

Ten innovation myths are identified and rebuffed by “truths”.

This book is perhaps best read as a concise summary of the lessons learned by innovators in a wide range of companies in a pre-recession US economy.

To steal a comparison from the Frasier comedy series, this is a Dr Honey Snow take on innovation, a mental hug that probably doesn’t have much relevance to the current recessionary business climate.

Michael Brennan lecturers in the University of Ulster business school.