This work offers a summary of the book “INNOVATION THAT FITS: Moving Beyond the Fads to Choose the Right Innovation Strategy For Your Business” by Michael Lord, Donald Debethizy and Jeffrey Wager.
Innovation that Fits is based on a commonsense principle: innovation is not predicated on faddish ideas and new fashions. The basis for innovation can never be a “silver bullet”: there are five ways companies usually innovate, and there are pros and cons to each.
The authors go through each of these, explaining how best to make them all work most effectively, and for which businesses/market situations they are best suited. If you are going to innovate by creating alliances with other companies, for example, be careful that you aren’t just rushing ahead because perceived risk is less, spread across both businesses. Be aware that you may begin to spend too much time maintaining the alliance rather than focusing on your own business. When things go wrong, a blame spiral can often occur that sours relations. If you do decide to go ahead, do your research and due diligence so that you know what each party’s objectives are. Set up a structure that’s focused, integrated, monitored and controlled and never leave your core work to a partner.
As you can see from this small sample, Innovation that fits is a comprehensive, invaluable guidebook to whichever style of innovation would suit your company.