Quirks and rules

Moser Baer and Malibu are nothing like they once were. One has gone from a business of time devices to a mass-market brand of memory discs, while the other has gone from a beach resort to a niche-market brand of lovey-dovey courtship. Theirs have been stories of wide market sensitivity and big picture analysis, punctuated by sudden brainwaves empowered by periodic bouts of bet-your-life courage: the kind of stuff innovation is supposed to be about. Quirks and sparks.

But where there's value, or projected value, there will soon be "rules". And while a few innovators may want to roll their eyes up at the thought, rejecting the generalisation of innovation would not help the world of business as we know it. The difficulty, then, is merely one of getting a universal consensus on what these rules should be.

Tuck professors Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble make a commendable effort in 10 Rules For Strategic Innovators: From Idea to Execution. In some ways, it complements Gary Hamel's Leading The Revolution and Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma, though more the latter than the former.

This book is about strategic breakthroughs and not process incrementalism, but the focus is clearly on taking on the internal corporate challenge. Is it aimed, thus, at the innovator within big business rather than the entrepreneur. No wonder it begins with Gifford Pinchot's commandments for "intrapreneurship", the first of which is: "Come to work each day willing to be fired". Govindarajan and Trimble's own first rule is equally morale-boosting: "In all great innovation stories, the great idea is only chapter 1".

That is the challenge: to do it. Most good ideas fall apart in the commercialisation phase, taking the operation from creative innovation to disciplined efficiency. It is here that the NewCo, the strategic experiment, must actively "Forget, Borrow and Learn". Forget parts of the OldCo's memory, Borrow some of its assets, and Learn the new business.

Some of the advice is along expected lines. On how to manage tension between NewCo and OldCo, for example, and insulate the former. But some of the other advice, especially on the learning process, is somewhat counterintuitive. One of NewCo's main roles is to make predictions on the basis of some theory or the other, and then test them, which sounds quite like regular lab work; but being bold, competitive or demanding, even reasonable, inspiring or diligent may not always be good, according to the authors. Given this sort of chutzpah, their chapter on Theory Focused Planning (TFP) seems almost like the result of an academia-dictated desire to deliver a sort of innovation algorithm for corporate engineers.

Anyhow, you may flip forward to the 10 Rules given at the end. The last chapter tells the story of how Analog Devices Inc's automotive chip division, with a crash-sensor innovation, nearly succumbed to the odds against it""stock market pressure and stiff internal metrics even began to distort its learning process""before it discovered how to make money off the steering wheel equipped with an airbag. "Hold NewCo accountable to learning, not results" is Rule No 9, the validity of which Analog's case testifies to.

But this book won't end the consensus challenge. Business evolves. Quirks and sparks endure. Maybe you can count on Rule No 1 to ensure that fresh thinking never ends.

10 RULES FOR STRATEGIC INNOVATORS
FROM IDEA TO EXECUTION

Vijay Govindarajan & Chris Trimble
Harvard Business School Press
Price: $29.95; Pages: xxvii+224