Making Innovation Work: How to Manage It, Measure It, and Profit from It

Profitable innovation doesn’t just happen. It must be managed, measured, and properly executed, and few companies know how to accomplish this effectively. Making Innovation Work presents a formal innovation process proven to work at HP, Microsoft and Toyota, to help ordinary managers drive top and bottom line growth from innovation. The authors have drawn on their unsurpassed innovation consulting experience -- as well as the most thorough review of innovation research ever performed. They'll show what works, what doesn't, and how to use management tools to dramatically increase the payoff from innovation investments. Learn how to define the right strategy for effective innovation; how to structure an organization to innovate best; how to implement management systems to assess ongoing innovation; how to incentivize teams to deliver, and much more. This book offers the first authoritative guide to using metrics at every step of the innovation process -- from idea creation and selection through prototyping and commercialization. This updated edition refreshes the examples used throughout the book and features a new introduction that gives currency to the principles covered throughout.

TONY DAVILA leads the Entrepreneurship Department and Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center at IESE Business School, and is one of the world’s leading scholars, speakers, and advisers on entrepreneurship and innovation. Building on his doctoral work at the Harvard Business School, he works with both large industrial companies and Silicon Valley startups to design management control and performance measurement systems that drive innovation.

MARC J. EPSTEIN is Distinguished Research Professor of Management at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. Previously Visiting Professor at Harvard, he has been a senior consultant to leading corporations and governments for more than thirty years, specializing in strategy implementation, innovation, governance, accountability, and performance metrics. He has also served as professor at Stanford Business School and INSEAD.

ROBERT D. SHELTON is the Leader of the Innovation Practice at a major global consulting firm. Through many years as an innovation consultant, his client list is a “who’s who” of innovative companies including leaders in high tech, consumer goods and services, software, financial services, cleantech, aerospace, and healthcare industries. He was Vice President and Managing Director with Arthur D. Little, and Managing Director of the SRI Worldwide Technology Management practice.