| | |  | General Improvement | Home » » » Fast Innovation: Achieving Superior Differentiation, Speed to Market, and Increased Profitability | | | | | | | Description: | | “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 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. | | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Michael George | | Hardcover:
| 335 pages | | Publisher:
| McGraw-Hill | | Publication Date:
| June 24, 2005 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 0071457895 | | Product Length:
| 9.14 inches | | Product Width:
| 6.36 inches | | Product Height:
| 1.17 inches | | Product Weight:
| 1.45 pounds | | Package Length:
| 8.8 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.9 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.3 inches | | Package Weight:
| 1.4 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 10 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
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8 of 9 found the following review helpful:
 Valuable Insights and Counsel in Combination with PracticalityFeb 27, 2006
By Robert Morris
The last time I checked, Amazon and its online partner Borders offer more than 12,000 different books on the subject of innovation. Presumably this number will continue to increase as organizations become more actively involved with strategic planning in a global marketplace which relies so heavily on both technology and innovation.
What we have in this volume is a remarkably thoughtful, indeed rigorous and insightful discussion of how to achieve superior differentiation, speed to market, and consequent increased profitability. Those who have read any of George's previously published books (Lean Six Sigma, Conquering Complexity in Your Business, and Lean Six Sigma for Service) already know that he is an expert on both process simplification and process innovation. The former achieves incremental progress while the latter (with higher risk and higher reward) enables what George and other business thinkers refer to as "breakthroughs." Highly disruptive technologies, for example. The most effective organizations (e.g. GE, 3M, and Allied Signal) are committed to sustaining both process simplification and innovation.
The subject of speed has always intrigued me. The challenge, obviously, is to determine when to increase, decrease, or sustain it. Now more than ever before, organizations must be able to respond quickly to crises, opportunities, etc. However, as James Thomas Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan, and the Light Brigade demonstrated at Balaclava in 1854, when decisions are based on insufficient information and/or poor judgment, the results can be disastrous. Moreover, doing nothing or doing it too late can be just as dangerous as acting impulsively rather than rationally.
George, Works, and Watson-Hemphill carefully organizes their material within 15 chapters as they respond to a number of critically important questions which include:
1. What are the most significant benefits of fast innovation?
2. What is the process by which to design a fast innovation program?
3. What are the most effective strategies when implementing that program?
4. Which tools are most helpful during implementation?
5. What is an "innovation factory"?
6. How to establish an "idea-rich" workplace environment?
7. Within which process should fast innovation projects be deployed?
8. How best to measure project progress accurately?
9. What is the "FastGate Method" and how does it work?
10. How to create "innovation incubators"?
I especially appreciate the authors' probing analysis of several case studies (e.g. Eli Lilly, Home Depot, Intel, ITT Industries, and Procter & Gamble) to demonstrate their key concepts as well as to suggest how each reader can (with appropriate modification) apply those core concepts within her or his own organization. To me, some of the most valuable material is found in Chapter 4 when George, Works, and Watson-Hemphill examine "The Value of Thinking in Three Dimensions": product-service innovation, market definition innovation, and process/business model innovation. I agree with them that products and services such as Microsoft Windows and Voice-over-Internet-Protocol telephony are the cornerstones of most innovation programs, there are perhaps even greater opportunities in the other two dimensions, market definition innovation (which reflects the leverage possible from existing customer relationships) and process/business model innovation (which can create a competitive advantage that lasts longer than that from sustaining product or service innovations).
The key point is, that the most important breakthroughs in innovation are achieved by those initiatives which are multidimensional. George, Works, and Watson-Hemphill also note that "there are many companies that have maintained above-average growth without innovating a single new product or service but rather by exploiting the market definition, or process/business model dimensions of innovation."
As indicated previously, "fast" innovation does not mean hurried innovation. More often than not, as an ancient aphorism suggests, it is often prudent to "make haste slowly." Also, as the authors would be the first to point out, decision-makers in a given organization must decide to what extent (if any) activity in one or more of the three dimensions makes sense. Moreover, although George and his co-authors offer an abundance of information, observations, insights, and recommendations, it remains for each reader to determine which (if any) are appropriate to her or his organization's needs, interests, current and imminent circumstances, available resources, etc. This is not an "easy read." On the contrary, it requires but will generously reward a careful consideration of its contents. Credit George, Works, and Watson-Hemphill with a logical organization of their material, and, an eloquent presentation of it.
If you share my high regard for this book, I urge you to check out George's previously published Conquering Complexity in Your Business: How Wal-Mart, Toyota, and Other Top Companies Are Breaking Through the Ceiling on Profits and Growth and Lean Six Sigma for Service: How to use Lean Speed & Six Sigma Quality to Improve Services and Transactions.
Also, Clayton Christensen and co-authors' Seeing What's Next, Geoffrey Moore's Dealing with Darwin, Tom Kelley's The Ten Faces of Innovation, Yoram (Jerry) Wind and co-authors' The Power of Impossible Thinking, and Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble's 10 Rules for Strategic Innovators. One other suggestion: one of the most influential books ever written on the subject of technological innovation, Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. It was first published in 1987 and, in certain respects, is even more relevant and more valuable now than ever before.
5 of 6 found the following review helpful:
 Strategy AND TacticsAug 22, 2005
By Alpheus Bingham
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, Strategy, Lilly Research Laboratories, Eli Lilly and Company
7 of 9 found the following review helpful:
 A bit of this, a bit of thatJan 20, 2006
By ARMAN KIRIM, PhD
After finishing this book I thought my time was wasted. Actually I should have guessed from the jacket cover that this would be six sigma forced into the popular (an also lucrative) topic of innovation. The book did indeed trurn out to be just that. Hence, lack of coherence. The only useful part for me was the one on Re-Use, which I thought, was brilliant. This was a very good handling of an often neglected but very important issue. But apart from that the whole book could be squeezed into a little article and all the arguments made here could succinctly be made in only a few pages. If you are after a good book on implementation of innovation, I recommend "Making Innovation Work" by Tony Davila et.al. Fast Innovation will not provide answers to most of your questions.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
The *why* behind Lean Six SigmaJul 20, 2005
By Margaret C. Stout
This book is full of concrete, grounded ways to maintain dominance in the market - or battlefield, in the case of the military systems I work on. An excellent book for anyone who wants to guide their organization to a pre-eminent position in the coming decade and beyond.
3 of 4 found the following review helpful:
Solid book on Innovation AND ExcecutionSep 23, 2005
By Anh Thu Vo
Having worked at several Silicon Valley start-ups and with several visionaries, I can honestly say that innovation, especially the product and new market definition types, are somewhat easily arrived. However, once envisioned, most start-ups/visionaries fail miserably to execute. Visions without execution are just hallucination!
This book not only presents the what's and why's of innovation but also the how's. It details some solid guidelines for being fast and productive in an uncertain environment where disruptive innovations reign.
I would recommend reading this book along with the following books:
- Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christensen
- Innovator's Solution, Clayton Christensen
- Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore
- Inside the Tornado, Geoffrey Moore
- Harvard Business Review's Darwin and the Demon, Geoffrey Moore
- Execution: the Discipline of Getting Things Done, Larry Bossidy et al
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