Fast Innovation: Achieving Superior Differentiation, Speed to Market, and Increased Profitability: Achieving Superior Differentiation, Speed to Market, and Increased Profitability

Michael L. George · James Works · Kimberly Watson-Hemphill · Clayton M. Christensen

Jul 2005 · McGraw Hill Professional

About this ebook

“How can I create an innovation engine that will consistently deliver substantial organic growth?”

This question is the number-one issue for most CEOs and senior executives today. Innovation is a critical driver of organic growth, yet based on the authors' research, only a small percent of companies effectively use innovation to sustain long-term, profitable growth. And the stakes couldn't be higher-failure to create successful new products, services, and business models causes stagnating or declining profits.

Now, for the first time, experts Michael George, James Works and Kimberly Watson-Hemphill explain the surprising and significant gap between the CEO's growth goals and actual performance. The authors, who are experts at connecting strategy to execution, give you a complete blueprint for exploiting the strategic and operational dimensions of innovation.

Using fresh insights about the true drivers of fast time-to-market and the inadequate success rate of innovation, Fast Innovation reveals:

• Why current approaches to innovation fail
• A new strategic and tactical plan that will help your company dramatically reduce time-to-market by 50 to 80 percent
• The secret for finding out what your customers really want (not just what they say they want)
• Tools and methods for turning customer insights into ideas that will generate significant ROI
• The key levers that senior leadership must engage to create innovation capability across the business

You'll receive specific actionable solutions for driving disruptive and sustaining innovation at the strategic, portfolio and project level. You'll also learn how to improve how much time your innovation teams actually spend innovating, and discover the changes that must be launched at the corporate level in order to enable the whole business to embrace and get results from this approach.

About the author

Michael L. George is an executive advisor and a leading expert at helping Fortune 500 companies connect strategy to execution. He is author of the bestselling Lean Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma for Service, and co-author of Conquering Complexity in Your Business. Mike is Chairman and CEO of George Group.

James Works advises senior executive teams in the areas of innovation, business strategy, operations improvement and organizational change. He is President and Chief Operating Officer of George Group.

Kimberly Watson-Hemphill has built a reputation over the last 12 years as a leading expert in the field of innovation and design across many different product, service and business model applications.