The document discusses the challenges of innovation execution in companies. It argues that while companies focus significant time on generating new ideas, they struggle with implementing innovations due to the demands of efficiency required by their performance engines. It presents three models of innovation - small, repeatable, and custom projects - and explains that most companies are built for performance not innovation. Breakthrough innovation requires breakthrough organizational design that prioritizes learning over short-term results and balances certainty with consequences.

1. Beyond the Idea
Vijay Govindarajan & Chris Trimble

2. Vijay Govindarajan and Chris
Trimble are professors at the Tuck
School at Dartmouth’s center for
Global Leadership. Indra Nooyi
wrote the foreword for their last
book on Reverse Innovation.

3. Thomas Edison said : Genius is 1
per cent inspiration and 99 per
cent perspiration.
No one listened. Companies allot
a lot of time to the 1 %, i.e. ideas
and struggle to execute
innovations.

4. Innovation is a two part challenge
– part one is ideas and part two is
execution

5. Innovation execution requires
time, energy and distinct thinking

6. Most companies are built to be
performance engines, a
performance engine demands
efficiency, innovation demands
something else.

7. Repeatability and predictability
are foundations of the
performance engine, they are also
the antithesis of innovation.

8. Innovation : Any project that is
new to your organization and has
an uncertain outcome.

9. There are three models of
innovation :
S: Small
R: Repeatable
C: Custom

10. Model S works on individual pride
and effort , since it uses up any
slack time that an employee has.

11. Motivation drives model small,
but process is the key to model R –
repeatable.

12. The more efficient a Model R –
repeatable becomes, the less
flexible it becomes.
Model R – repeatable can only
deliver this years version of last
years product.

13. With Model c – custom, we must
think of one initiative at a time.
Each is a custom effect and
requires its own special team and
special plan.

14. You simply don’t get breakthrough
innovation without breakthrough
organizational design.

15. The Innovation leader is someone
who will partner with the
performance engine and not fight
it.

16. Companies tend to ask too much
of shared central staff because
they are usually talented and a
company feels they can do
anything.

17. ‘If you want to change the culture,
change the people’

18. Senior executives tend to treat the
problem of peer trouble below
them as ‘ they will sort it out, they
are adults’. That’s not true. A
performance engine always
smashes the innovation engine.

19. In the context of innovation,
learning is valuable and should be
prioritized over results.

20. We define learning as
improvement in the accuracy of
predictions.

21. Learning should take priority over
results because faster learning
leads to better results.

22. All Innovation leaders have to
spend a little, learn a lot.

23. The planning process of a
performance engine is not right
for an innovation engine

24. One must balance the
consequences with certainty of
each plan. Consequences are
being a little wrong to badly
wrong, certainty is definite to
uncertain.

25. No performance engine lasts
forever, that’s why we need
innovation. Over the long run
strategy and innovation are tightly
coupled.

26. At the core is a three box process :
1. Manage the present
2.Selectively forget the past
3. Create the future.

27. Innovation and change are similar
challenges. They both involve
encouraging employees to move
in new directions.

28. Innovation is about
experimentation. Innovation
initiatives are launched with a full
understanding that the outcome is
uncertain. Failure is an option.