Vijay Govindarajan was interviewed by Jim Mellado about getting innovation right. Vijay is ranked #3 on Thinkers 50 and was named one of the Top 10 Business School Professors in the world by Business Week.
- Strategy is about leadership in the future therefore if you want to be a leader in the future you need to adapt
- Strategy is innovation
- How much of your current efforts are in:
- Box 1: mange the present / Competition for the present = efficiency
- Box 2: Selectively forget the past
- Box 3: Create the future / Competition for the future = innovation
- Improving the efficiency of you’re system today will only take you so far. You’ve got to innovate and adapt.
- Dominate logic bubbles up in the organization (metrics, execution, efficiencies = bring self imposed boundaries)
- The Central Problem: How do you preserve and overcome the dominate logic at the same time Create the future while managing the present with efficiency?
- Innovation is more than Ideas: It’s not creativity, it’s commercializing and executing the creativity of the ideas.
- Innovation is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
- Innovation equation: Innovation = idea + leader + team + plan + execution
- Innovation Leader: it’s not the responsibility of the just the leader.
- Innovation leaders have to be humble, work with the bureaucracy and harness the great capability of the core business not be subversive
- Innovation killers:
- Make the false assumption that innovation can happen inside the performance engine (innovation is the opposite of efficiency)
- Not constituting the team and the plan effectively
- The innovation team must be dedicated, different and distinct from the performance engine team. But linked to the performance engine team.
- The future is now…the future is not about what the organization does in the future, but what you do right now.
- If you want a tree 5 years from now you have to plant new seeds today.
- To be innovative you are going to have to fight organizational memory while simultaneously depending on it
- Conflict is not bad in an organization…if you know how to manage them… you can harness the best ideas
- Zero based planning & organizing: test assumptions
- Spend a little, learn a lot, because you’ve got a lot of assumptions to test
- Innovation is about value for many not value for money. Which means you have to be able to do more with less.
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