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Vijay Govindarajan

Vijay is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on strategy and innovation. He is the Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business and the Founding Director of the Center for Global Leadership at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.

He was the first Professor in Residence and Chief Innovation Consultant at General Electric. He has been cited by BusinessWeek, Forbes, and The London Times as the top thought leader in strategy.

Chris Trimble

Chris has dedicated the past ten years to studying a single challenge that vexes even the best-managed corporations: how to execute an innovation initiative. Most recently, he published the cover article “How GE is Disrupting Itself” in the October 2009 Harvard Business Review, with Jeff Immelt and Vijay Govindarajan.

Chris first broke into the forefront of executive consciousness with the book, Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators – from Idea to Execution. Ten Rules has been included in the Wall Street Journal Top Ten Recommended Reading List and in 2006 Strategy & Business magazine recognized it as the best strategy book of the year.

SIX FOUNDATIONS OF INNOVATION 1. Divide the Labor Decide how responsibilities for executing the initiative will be split between the Dedicated Team. 2. Assemble the Dedicated Team. Determine who will serve on the Dedicated Team and how to define their roles and responsibilities. 3. Manage the Partnership. Establish clear expectations for each partner and mediate the inevitable conflicts that will arise between the two. 4. Formalize the Experiment. The basic principles for learning from experiments are familiar but hard to follow. 5. Break Down the Hypothesis. All but the simplest innovation initiatives are really compound experiments. There are two or more uncertain conjectures. 6. Seek Truth. There are a myriad of pressures in organizations that push people towards interpretations of results that are comfortable and convenient rather than analytical and dispassionate. These pressures must be understood and overcome.

WORKSHOP DATES JUNE 7-8, 2010 NOVEMBER 1-2,2010 ** All dates held at AASA headquarters, Arlington, VA.

 

Workshop participants discover a straight-forward approach to executing an innovation initiative, involving, in particular, a special kind of team and a special kind of plan.

There are a few terms that need to be defined in order to make sense of the workshop.

The Innovation Initiative:
An innovation initiative is a project that is new to a company and has an uncertain outcome. The purpose of the project could be to introduce a new process, a new product, a new service, or a new business. It is not, however, a small process improvement that a one or a few people could handle in their spare time, nor is it an effort to launch a new product or service that is very similar to existing products or services.

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The Performance Engine:
The Performance Engine, the bulk of any established business organization, focuses on ongoing operations. The Performance Engine’s driving interests are efficiency, productivity, and profitability. It strives to make every task and every activity as repeatable and predictable as possible.

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The Fundamental Incompatibilities:
There are deep incompatibilities between innovation and ongoing operations. The Performance Engine may be the master of repeatable and predictable, but an innovation initiative is just the opposite. It is non-routine and uncertain.

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The Core Prescription:
Because of the fundamental incompatibilities, each innovation initiative requires a team with a custom organizational model, the Dedicated Team, and a plan that is revised only through a rigorous learning process.

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The Innovation Team:
The innovation team is always a partnership between a Dedicated Team and the Performance Engine - specifically, a subset of Performance Engine employees called the Shared Staff. The Dedicated Team must be built from scratch, with it’s own organizational model and performance metrics.

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As this event has limited seating, please let us know now if you might be interested so we can reserve a space for you.

The cost is $2,995 for the two-day workshop, training in the concepts, and materials license to help you energize others in your organization

 

Who should participate? Innovation Leaders: You own the plan for the initiative more than any other person. You are the single point of accountability and the leader whose responsibilities span not just one aspect of the initiative, but the overall project. As such, you are responsible for building the team and making it effective - despite the fact that in most cases you will not have complete control. Members of the Team: The best-prepared team members fully understand the challenges their leaders face and what will be expected of them. In addition, they must consider: What legacies of my experience working within this organization (or other organizations) might I need to leave behind to be successful on this project? Performance metrics I’ve always relied upon? Expectations I have of peers? Mid Level Managers and Executives: These are managers and leaders in the organization who must understand the foundations of innovation in order to support the process from their position. Supervising Executives: The innovation leader reports to the supervising executive, someone with critical and demanding responsibilities in successful execution of innovation initiatives. CEOs and Chief Innovation Officers: To reach their highest aspirations, CEOs and chief innovation officers must scale up from single innovation projects to routine innovation success. They must institutionalize innovation. This is a high aspiration, but the journey is much shorter once the core principles for managing single innovation projects have been mastered. Performance Engine Leaders who Support an Innovation Initiative: These leaders must understand the conflicts between innovation and ongoing operations and how best to support innovation initiatives while sustaining excellence in ongoing operations. Innovation Coaches and Facilitators: These leaders facilitate learning the foundations of innovation and provide practical support throughout the execution of the innovation initiative.

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