|
The image of the creative, inspired entrepreneur who sees the future in a different way and develops a breakthrough idea is deeply embedded in business culture. But coming up with the killer idea is only one small part of the battle, according to Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble, authors of the new book, 10 Rules for Strategic Innovators. Where most companies fail at innovation, they contend, is in the area of execution, not idea generation.
Survey after survey shows that most company executives believe they are far better at generating ideas than executing them. Despite the fact that the real leverages in the backend of innovation - in execution - most managers of obsess over the front end of the innovation process, on generating ideas. Once a high potential idea has been identified, a business plan has been written and refined, and a passionate leader has been assigned to run it, everyone assumes that the rest will be easy.
“The error is in assuming that the company has already hurdled the most difficult barriers to innovation: finding a great idea and a great leader. In fact, the biggest challenges are still to come. Our research has shown that strategic experiments face their stiffest resistance once they are showing signs of success, consuming more resources, and clashing with (the parent company) at multiple levels.”
Here are some of the challenges that a new internal venture faces, according to Govindarajan and Trimble:
- It must attract funding
- It must learn quickly from success and failure
- It must rally people around a fuzzy view of the future
- It must reorganize the leverage the lessons learned
- It must manage expectations of performance and chaos
The authors have also identified six tendencies of established organizations that new ventures also typically face:
- Protecting funding for the new venture regardless of the performance of the parent company
- Establishing new organizational norms and policies that make sense for the new venture
- Overcoming tensions between the new venture and the existing company when those norms and policies conflict
- Affecting changes in the existing power structure required to support the new venture
- Engaging employees of the parent company in supporting the new venture and
- Recruiting talented managers from the parent company to work within the new venture
In short, the degree of managerial difficulty for any new internal venture is very high. The authors suggest that even the most charismatic champion will find it hard to defend the new venture against these challenges.
While these challenges may be significant, Govindarajan and Trimble don’t believe they are insurmountable. Identifying them and anticipating them is the first step toward overcoming them. Not surprisingly, the rest of the book is focused on how to execute innovation effectively. |
