The New York Times bestselling authors of Reverse Innovation and How Stella Saved the Farm distill more than a decade of exclusive research into one short, powerful, action-oriented book.

Companies stumble when they imagine that innovation is mostly about ideas. The reality is that ideas are only beginnings. Indeed, even a company with the world’s best idea still faces a devilish challenge: it must build the business of tomorrow without endangering the business of today.

Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble are the world’s leading authorities on the successful management of innovation. In Beyond the Idea, they distill more than a decade of research and insight into a practical, accessible, read-at-one-sitting handbook that offers invaluable guidance for anyone charged with making innovation happen: executives, managers, consultants, project leaders, and teams.

By offering specific action steps, Beyond the Idea extends the elegant conceptual insights from How Stella Saved the Farm, Govindarajan and Trimble’s parable. Beyond the Idea shows exactly how to:

– Build a team with a very particular structure, one that makes it possible to simultaneously build something new and sustain what exists.

– Manage any innovation initiative as a disciplined experiment.

– Implement three distinct models for moving from ideas to action.

Beyond the Idea is an essential book for any business that recognizes that innovation always has been, and always will be, the key to long term growth and vitality.

How Stella Saved the Farm is a simple parable about making innovation happen. Written by the authors of the New York Times bestselling Reverse Innovation: Create Far From Home, Win Everywhere, Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble.

This story resonates in organizations of all types–public sector, private sector, and social sector, from mammoth corporations to small organizations employing just a few dozen people.

The parable is about a farm in trouble. Bankruptcy, or the grim prospect of being acquired by a hostile competitor, threaten. The farm succeeds only if the team pulls together and innovates.

The main characters in the story–Stella, Deirdre, Bull, Mav, Einstein, Rambo, Maisie, and Andrea–are all like people you know, maybe even yourself. The tale includes an unexpected leadership challenge, an ambitious call to action, a bold idea, countless internal obstacles and conflicts, fears, joys, triumphs, and even a love interest.

It’s a story that can be enjoyed by anyone. In How Stella Saved the Farm delivers eight simple lessons to guide innovation initiatives to success. It prepares business leaders to avoid some of innovation’s most toxic myths, teaches how to build the right kind of team, and shows how to learn quickly from experience.

Innovation is no longer the exclusive domain of the Silicon Valley elite. Reverse Innovation will open your eyes to the fact that the dynamics of global innovation are changing-and if you want your firm to survive, you’d better pay attention. The gap between rich nations and emerging economies is closing. No longer will innovations travel the globe in only one direction, from developed to developing nations. They will also flow in reverse.
Authors Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth explain where, when, and why reverse innovation is on the rise and why the implications are so profound. Learn how to make innovation in emerging markets happen and how such innovations can unlock even greater opportunity throughout the world. You’ll follow some of the world’s leading companies (including GE, Deere Company, PG, and PepsiCo) through stories that illustrate exactly what works and what doesn’t.
If you’re in a Western economy, you need to accept that the future lies far from home. But the idea is not just for Western audiences. If innovation is at the heart of your company or your career, no matter where you practice business, reverse innovation is a phenomenon you need to understand. This book will help you do that.

How to Innovate and Execute Leaders already know that innovation calls for a different set of activities, skills, methods, metrics, mind-sets, and leadership approaches. And it is well understood that creating a new business and optimizing an already existing one are two fundamentally different management challenges. The real problem for leaders is doing both, simultaneously. How do you meet the performance requirements of the existing business-one that is still thriving-while dramatically reinventing it? How do you envision a change in your current business model before a crisis forces you to abandon it? Innovation guru Vijay Govindarajan expands the leader’s innovation tool kit with a simple and proven method for allocating the organization’s energy, time, and resources-in balanced measure-across what he calls “the three boxes”: – Box 1: The present-Manage the core business at peak profitability – Box 2: The past-Abandon ideas, practices, and attitudes that could inhibit innovation – Box 3: The future-Convert breakthrough ideas into new products and businesses The three-box framework makes leading innovation easier because it gives leaders a simple vocabulary and set of tools for managing and measuring these different sets of behaviors and activities across all levels of the organization. Supported with rich company examples-GE, Mahindra & Mahindra, Hasbro, IBM, United Rentals, and Tata Consultancy Services-and testimonies of leaders who have successfully used this framework, this book solves once and for all the practical dilemma of how to align an organization on the critical but competing demands of innovation.

A new, comprehensive playbook for innovation from the New York Times bestselling author of Reverse
Innovation, Vijay Govindarajan

In his seminal book The Three-Box Solution, Vijay Govindarajan offered an amazingly simple and highly effective
framework for leading innovation:
* Execute the present core business at peak efficiency (Box 1)
* Avoid the inhibiting traps of past success (Box 2)
* Build a future day by day through breakthrough innovations (Box 3)

Since the book’s publication, companies across the globe have used the three-box framework to great success. Now,
along with Manish Tangri, a corporate dealmaker at Intel, Govindarajan goes deeper into the most crucial box of all:
creating the future. Together they provide a repeatable process for companies to create new breakthroughs–from
ideation through incubation to scaling.

Full of worksheets, exercises, tools, and examples, The Three-Box Solution Playbook is the guide you and your team
need to drive innovation and growth–and continually revitalize your company.