Ideas more glamorous than execution: Vijay Govindarajan
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 24 August 2010, 23:19 IST   |    2 Comments
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Ideas more glamorous than execution: Vijay Govindarajan
Bangalore: Many companies trip at the innovation hurdle when they become enamoured with ideas. Ideas are far more glamorous compared to the actual execution. They are safe and don't create conflict. That's why so many great ideas remain just that - a great idea. Until something is just a germ of an idea, it holds potential and promise to unleash change in the world - and your business. And the trouble begins when you start acting upon that idea, says Vijay Govindarajan, Professor of International Business at the Tuck School of Business and founding director of Tuck's Center for Global Leadership. Why ideas - specifically innovative initiatives - fail has been at the heart of Govindarajan's research for almost a decade now. Companies are so enamoured in their quest to find that one big breakthrough idea that they ignore the far more crucial part the execution. The boring, mundane, repetitive, everyday work that's critical for ideas to work. The core of a business is focused on efficiency, innovation by definition is an experiment, so there are bound to be clashes. But some firms have made successful transitions too. "A lot of companies mistakenly assume that execution will not be a problem with them because they run their core businesses successfully," he says. That's hurdle number one because excelling at the core business doesn't necessarily translate into success at a new venture. And internal conflicts arising out of trying to do something dramatically different add to the impediments that make sure ideas remain just ideas. Having spent the past decade researching innovation within established organizations along with Professor Chris Trimble, a colleague at Tuck School, the duo put out their first set of findings in 2005 in Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators - from Idea to Execution. "Ten Rules was aimed at people who were undertaking 'high risk-high reward' innovations like the Tata Nano," Govindrajan says. But after reading the thought provoking book, the feedback that the duo received from the readers was that the framework discussed in the book wasn't practical for the kind of innovations they were undertaking. Most people aren't going to do a high-risk innovation everyday. But they are doing other smaller innovations nonetheless. The Other Side of innovation tries to provide a set of generalized principles that could apply to absolutely any kind of innovation. Using Infosys as an example of how to successfully carry out such a transition, Govindarajan rewinds to 2000 when the software major decided that its core business of providing software solutions to global firms was doing well and it was time to look elsewhere. The move into the consulting business was a fundamental innovation, moving from solving technical problems to business problems, from interfacing with the CIO to the CEO.

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