Beyond the Idea ─ How to Execute Innovation in Any Organization

The New York Times bestselling authors of Reverse Innovation and How Stella Saved the Farm distill more than a decade of exclusive research into one short, powerful, action-oriented book.

Companies stumble when they imagine that innovation is mostly about ideas. The reality is that ideas are only beginnings. Indeed, even a company with the world’s best idea still faces a devilish challenge. It must simultaneously execute two tasks that are fundamentally in conflict: building something new and sustaining what exists.

Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble are the world’s leading authorities on innovation execution. In Beyond the Idea, they distill more than a decade of research and insight into a practical, accessible, read-at-one-sitting handbook that offers invaluable guidance for anyone charged with making innovation happen: executives, managers, consultants, project leaders, and teams.

By offering specific action steps, Beyond the Idea extends the elegant conceptual insights from How Stella Saved the Farm, Govindarajan and Trimble’s parable. Beyond the Idea shows exactly how to:

• Build a team with a very particular structure, one that makes it possible to simultaneously build something new and sustain what exists.
• Manage any innovation initiative as a disciplined experiment.
• Recognize and overcome the fundamental limitations of two commonplace models for innovation execution — one for process improvement efforts, the other for routine new product development efforts.

Beyond the Idea is an essential book for any business that recognizes that innovation always has been, and always will be, the key to long term growth and vitality.

VIJAY GOVINDARAJAN (VG) is the Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business at Tuck at Dartmouth. In the latest global ranking of management thinkers, VG came in third place. He lives in New Hampshire.

CHRIS TRIMBLE, also on the faculty at Tuck, has been an advisor for dozens of top corporations. With Govindarajan he co-authored The New York Times bestseller Reverse Innovation (2012) and How Stella Saved the Farm (2013). He lives in Vermont.