No-Excuses Innovation: Strategies for Small- and Medium-Sized Mature Enterprises

The case for innovation and a clear, targeted strategy for planning and implementation that will help small- and medium-sized mature enterprises (SMMEs) thrive through reinvention and renewal.

In contrast to large companies, SMMEs are on their own to win or lose in the marketplace. They may lack the relative economies of scale and scope, available to large companies, to understand and invest in innovation. Often they are in a position of sustained disadvantage with no perceived path of renewal.

As SMMEs approach maturity, it is common for them to choose to only maintain what they believe to be the safety of maturity attained rather than to opt for a strategy that also includes constant reinvention and renewal. But as Bruce A. Vojak and Walter B. Herbst argue, this path of seemingly least risk and least resistance can be the most detrimental to the company in the long run.

The real risk is to not innovate.

No-Excuses Innovation makes the case to owners, advisors, executives, and leaders―as well as those in the trenches―of the value of innovation: why it's worthy of investment and what it can do for the health and longevity of a company. This book also details how innovation, and thus reinvention and renewal, can be most effectively and efficiently implemented. With case studies and narrative examples drawn from their time in industry and the academy, the authors present a valuable strategy guide specific to SMMEs and to one of the biggest existential dilemmas they encounter.

Bruce Vojak Ph.D. is Managing Director and Founder of Breakthrough Innovation Advisors, LLC. and co-author of Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms (Stanford University Press, 2012). Formerly Director of Advanced Technology at Motorola and Associate Dean and Adjunct Professor in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, he currently serves on the boards of Midtronics, Inc., JVA Partners, and Micron Industries Corporation. Walter B. Herbst Ph.D., FNAI (Fellow National Academy of Inventors) is a partner and co-founder of Herbst Produkt, a firm with, among other accolades, fourteen Edison Awards in the last ten years. He is also a Distinguished Clinical Professor Emeritus at the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University and the founder of their Master of Product Design and Development Management Program.