Payback: Reaping the Rewards of Innovation

Description

If you're like most people, you bet your career and company on innovation--because you must. Payback: Reaping the Rewards of Innovation offers you a new way to think about and manage innovation that will dramatically improve the odds of success. Authors James Andrew and Harold Sirkin, senior partners in The Boston Consulting Group, describe an approach to managing innovation based on the concept of a cash curve--which tracks investment against time. They ask the questions you need to ask: How much should you invest in a new product or service? How fast should you push it to market? How quickly can you get to optimal value? How much additional investment should you pour into sustaining and building the product or service? Payback offers you practical and economically sound advice on when to pursue cash flow indirectly by first pursuing other benefits, such as brand and knowledge. It also shows you how to reshape the cash curve by using different business models--integrator, orchestrator, and licenser--each of which balances risk and reward differently. The authors then present a short list of decisions and activities that you must make--not delegate--to achieve a high return on innovation. You won't find facile answers in Payback--but you will find valuable insights and practical guidance for mastering one of the most challenging and critical business activities: innovation.

Jim Andrew is a senior vice president and director of The Boston Consulting Group. He leads BCG's global efforts to articulate and improve how companies transform ideas into profits. He joined the firm in 1986, founded and ran BCG's offices in Mumbai (Bombay), India and Singapore, and is now based in Chicago. Jim writes and speaks extensively about innovation. He is lead author of the Harvard Business Review article "Innovating for Cash" (Sept. 2003). He has been featured in The Economist, Business Week, Fast Company and many other leading periodicals globally. Hal Sirkin is senior vice president and director at BCG and worldwide leader of the Global Operations practice. He has extensive experience in operations across a wide range of topics and industries. Throughout his career he has helped leading companies to develop breakthrough innovation strategies. He is the co-author of "Innovating for Cash" and is the author of many other articles, which have appeared in Harvard Business Review, Industry Week, Journal of Business Strategy and other publications. John Butman is the author, editor, or collaborating writer of more than a dozen books about business management and social change. His most recent collaboration with BCG was Trading Up: The New American Luxury, which was a BusinessWeek bestseller and was named Berry-AMA Best Book of 2004.