Executing Innovation: That Fabulous Idea Is Just the Start

Chris Trimble is a practical guy, at least when it comes to innovation. He’s not about how to come up with a brilliant idea that could propel your business into a new stratosphere of success. He’s about the hard part: how to execute that idea so your innovation comes to life in the real world.  

Trimble is coauthor of four best-selling business books on innovation, all based on more than a decade of studying the best practices for making innovation happen in established organizations. His most recent book, How Stella Saved the Farm: A Wild and Woolly Yarn About Making Innovation Happen(St. Martin's Press 2013), was published a month ago. Trimble and coauthor Vijay Govindarajan describe it as “a light read with very serious intent.” 

“It's certainly the most unique of the four books,” Trimble told Travel Weekly PLUS. “It's a parable, it can be read in an hour or so, and it’s meant to be used as an instigator of good, productive, non-defensive conversations about innovation.” Several organizations, including Fortune 500 companies such as AT&T, John Deere, and GE, have already done exactly that. 

Trimble, who is also a faculty member of the business school at Dartmouth College, discusses how businesses large and small can implement those Super Fabulous New Ideas with Diane Merlino, editor in chief of Travel Weekly PLUS.  

Merlino: What’s your best quick-hit definition of innovation, Chris?  Or is there a quick hit definition?
Trimble: There is. But it's a much more important question than you might imagine because people are always trying to draw the line between what “counts” as innovation and what does not. We've seen that this does nothing but start fights and hurt people's feelings, and it's for the most part unnecessary. 

Our definition of innovation is just a project that is new to your company and has an uncertain outcome. It's a very deliberately broad and inclusive definition, and it works for us primarily because we have studied what we describe as the other side of innovation, which is what happens after you have an idea.

Lots of other scholars have created different innovation categories. Sustaining-versus-disruptive innovation may be the best known. This is really important when you're selecting an idea, but these distinctions become much less important when you get to the other side, when you actually have to execute the idea.

Merlino: You’ve done case studies on innovation in a variety of companies over the last decade or so. How do you work up a case study about corporate innovation?
Trimble: Innovation is a challenging topic to study because there's very little that you can count. It's not like finance or accounting or any of these more quantitative business fields. Studying innovation is much more like studying history.

So, what my coauthor and I have done since 2000 is to go in to corporations and piece together the histories of innovation initiatives. And not always successful ones: some failures, some successes, and some early failures that turned themselves around and became success stories. And we've tried to pick apart the best practices in each case history that we put together. 

Merlino: What are some of the companies where you’ve conducted case histories of innovation?
Trimble: Our very first one is in many ways the one that remains the most instructive. It was about the New York Times Company and its launch of New York Times Digital. We've since done probably three-dozen case studies. Sometimes we do two or three in the same company because it makes for an interesting comparison point. 

We've been in the semiconductor industry and studied a company called Analog Devices. We've studied Deere & Company, the agricultural equipment maker.  We've studied a couple of software companies, including Infosys, the outsourcing giant out of India, and IBM as well. The Wall Street Journal, Thomson Reuters.  These are just to name a few.

Merlino: Chris, you’ve described innovation as business at its best. What do you mean by that statement? Other folks may think profits or job creation is business at its best.
Trimble: The quickest way to get to an answer is to simply say that there's two ways to make money in this world. One is to compete or to negotiate with a supplier or a customer or a rival, and basically transfer value that's being created in the world from their pocket to yours. This is a zero-sum game. There's always a winner and a loser. 

I say innovation is business at its best because it's about creating new value, and it's win-win when it works. You earn a profit, and your customers gain something of value that they've never been able to attain before. It's through innovation that we've solved unsolved problems, that we've improved lives, that we've raised living standards throughout the world. Innovation is business at its best.

Merlino: Let’s stay on this idea. Do you have any examples from the companies you’ve studied of innovation yielding these great outcomes — like solving unsolved problems or raising living standards?
Trimble: Diane, earlier I mentioned the semiconductor company, Analog Devices. It may not be the best-known company in the world, but one of their inventions is something that most everyone who drives depends upon.
This is a company that took the lead in commercializing modern automotive crash sensors and it has saved countless lives in the process.  It wasn't a huge moneymaker for Analog Devices, at least not early on, but it certainly brought benefits to the world.

Merlino: You speak about innovation as a two-part problem — ideas and execution — and you say that most companies tend to fall down on the execution side.
Trimble: Every now and then I'll come across a map of the innovation process when I work with clients. Lots of companies have tried to map out the innovation process, and the typical map will look something like this: Stage One, Generating Ideas; Stage Two, Evaluating Ideas; Stage Three, Selecting the Best Idea to Invest In. And finally, way over on the right-hand side of the page, you'll see Execution. 

Execution is always sort of the afterthought in the innovation game, and it's not that hard to understand why. First of all, everybody likes to get involved in the idea generation part.  If you want to pull people in for a brainstorming session, it never requires heavy persuasion. Let's face it, this is fun, right? 

Not only that, when it comes to innovation, we have, in my view, a very peculiar way of deciding who has the most status. How many times have you run into somebody that works at a startup and likes to brag that they're Employee No. 3 or Employee No. 7 or whatever the case may be. What this means is if you're Employee  No. 1, if you're the idea person, then you're the king. We really put idea people up on a pedestal, especially in the United States. 

The other side of innovation, by contrast, is about blocking and tackling. It's about getting the work done. It's about blood, sweat, and tears. It is, plainly put, less fun than the big idea hunt. That's why you can generate a lot of excitement and a lot of enthusiasm around the big idea hunt, but when it comes time to execute, you find a lot of people run for the hills.

Because they're busy. And what an innovation project is now is a chance to fail. Things go wrong on the other side of innovation, whereas very little can go wrong in the big idea hunt. 

Merlino: In the companies you’ve worked with you must have experienced failure to bring some great projects from the idea stage into reality. Do you have any examples in that area you'd care to share?
Trimble: We’ve examined various innovation failures. Just one example we’ve written up was an effort by Hasbro to get into CD-ROM-based videogames. This sounds ancient now because technology moves so fast, but it was just 10 or 15 years ago.

And at the time, if you're a company that has depended on cardboard boxes with traditional board games in them and you see this new technology come along, you're pretty fearful, and you're wondering if the future of gaming is all electronics-based. So Hasbro made a pretty significant investment in a new unit that would produce CD-ROM-based games.

Things were going gangbusters for a while, and they did extremely well when they were converting their existing brands into videogames. They did a Monopoly videogame and a Scrabble videogame. But they wanted to grow the business much, much bigger. This all happened during the dotcom boom and bust, and because of the early successes they had, trying to make the business become much bigger was harder than they anticipated. It ended quite horribly. They sold off the whole division and got out of videogames altogether for a while. It was a shame that it ended up that way because they did have some products that were doing quite well. 

Merlino: Was the unanticipated economic difficulty the main reason they backed off of that innovation?
Trimble: There's often this sort of emotional boom-and-bust mentality that goes along with innovation. The antidote is a real careful and disciplined approach to experimentation, so that you know at all times exactly what's working and what's not, and you can make adjustments as you go.

Merlino: Is this related to your ideas about managing innovation?
Trimble: It's part of it.  Running disciplined experiments is a key piece of it. Another huge piece of the puzzle is forming the right teams for each and every innovation initiative. 

We tend to imagine that innovation is mostly about brilliant people with brilliant ideas who do whatever it takes to bring that innovation to market. That's a pretty unsophisticated viewpoint, frankly. Let’s be clear on what the challenge is: The challenge is not just to create something new; it is to create something new while simultaneously sustaining excellence in what you already do. 

To imagine that one person fighting the system can tackle this challenge is to indulge in a little bit of fantasy. It takes a team to tackle this two-part challenge — building something new and sustaining what exists. And it takes a very carefully structured team. Getting that team structure right is a huge chunk of what we've been writing about over the years.

NEXT ISSUE: Innovation expert Chris Trimble on how to create and manage an innovation team.