Executing Innovation: Expert Solutions to Everyday Challenges

By Harvard Business Review Press

The Pocket Mentor series offers immediate solutions to the challenges managers face on the job every day. Each book in the series is packed with handy tools, self-tests, and real-life examples to help you identify strengths and weaknesses and hone critical skills. Whether you're at your desk, in a meeting, or on the road, these portable guides enable you to tackle the daily demands of your work with greater speed, savvy, and effectiveness.

Ideas are not enough: successful innovation requires people to pick up where the creative process leaves off. These people must take the creative idea and apply it to a real-life problem to design a new product, service, or process. They must construct a carefully articulated vision for the project, draw up a feasible financial plan, and advocate the project over the whole course of its development and implementation.

This book teaches you how to execute an innovation from start to finish:
- Develop a vision statement that stands up to evaluation criteria
- Build a strong business case to the stakeholders who will be affected
- Manage both explicit and hidden resistance to change
- Sustain the passion around your idea and keeping its momentum going

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Release date: Mar 2, 2009
• ISBN: 9781422129555

Book preview

Inc.

Executing Innovation: The Basics

Why Innovate?

TODAY ’S BUSINESS environment is rapidly changing. New technologies, governmental regulations, and global market conditions are forcing companies to quickly develop new products and differentiate their service offerings while increasing productivity and cost efficiency. To maintain their competitive advantage, companies need to innovate.

When you hear the word innovation, you may think of a technology-driven service such as online shopping, or a ground breaking product such as the smart mobile phone. However, innovation comes in many forms. For example, consider a new process for efficiently sharing information and internal expertise within a software development firm with offices in New York and Berlin. Employees who don’t know each other could communicate client information and revise product specifications in real time. This innovative process may not involve any new technology or result in a new product, but it could give the company significant competitive advantage by increasing the knowledge base of its employees and improving customer