Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators

Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators – Vijay Govindarajan

Large companies often generate promising new ideas, but turning them into successful new businesses is a different matter. In Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators: From Idea to Execution, Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble, professors at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, address the challenges established organizations face when they try to build new ventures within their walls.

Based on extensive research into strategic experiments at major corporations, the authors explain why new ventures often struggle inside successful companies. The very practices that make a company excellent at running its existing business, such as efficiency, predictability and tight control, can undermine new initiatives that require experimentation, learning and flexibility.

The book presents ten rules organized around three challenges: forgetting, borrowing and learning. New ventures must forget some of the assumptions and practices of the parent company, building separate teams and processes where needed. At the same time, they must borrow valuable assets and capabilities from the core business, managing tensions between the two. And they must learn quickly, using disciplined planning and evaluation methods that focus on testing assumptions rather than simply meeting fixed targets.

Case studies from companies in several industries illustrate how these rules work in practice and what happens when they are ignored.

Insightful and practical, Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators is a valuable resource for executives, managers, innovation leaders and business students seeking to turn bold ideas into successful new businesses within established organizations.