Beyond the Idea

How to Execute Innovation in Any Organization

By: Vijay Govindarajan, Chris Trimble

Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith

The New York Times best-selling authors of Reverse Innovation and How Stella Saved the Farm distill more than a decade of exclusive research into one short, powerful, action-oriented audiobook.

Companies stumble when they imagine that innovation is mostly about ideas. The reality is that ideas are only beginnings. Indeed, even a company with the world’s best idea still faces a devilish challenge: it must build the business of tomorrow without endangering the business of today.

Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble are the world’s leading authorities on the successful management of innovation. In Beyond the Idea, they distill more than a decade of research and insight into a practical, accessible, listen-at-one-sitting handbook that offers invaluable guidance for anyone charged with making innovation happen: executives, managers, consultants, project leaders, and teams.

By offering specific action steps, Beyond the Idea extends the elegant conceptual insights from How Stella Saved the Farm, Govindarajan and Trimble’s parable. Beyond the Idea shows exactly how to:

• Build a team with a very particular structure, one that makes it possible to simultaneously build something new and sustain what exists
• Manage any innovation initiative as a disciplined experiment
• Implement three distinct models for moving from ideas to action

Beyond the Idea is an essential book for any business that recognizes that innovation always has been, and always will be, the key to long term growth and vitality.

©2013 Vijay Govindarajan and Christ Trimble (P)2013 Macmillan Audio

Great for senior executives.

Great read for senior executives and for those involved in strategic planning and organizational realignment.

Not good as an audio book.

What disappointed you about Beyond the Idea?

The content reads as academic work by people who've consulted on business but never lived and died by it. As an audio book, it's next to worthless - 30% is just the reader describing tables that are impossible to track in your head.

They talk about their intentionality in keeping it short and digestible so even an executive would have time to read it, but I don't think I could get anyone to finish it - the content is really dry. It desperately needs an accompanying .pdf to articulate the visuals.

What could Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

Adding an accompanying .pdf would make the audio version infinitely more useful.

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

It offers a framework for evaluating innovation in a large organization, which is useful for continuing a healthy conversation about how to do it better.

outdated reader and content

this book could have been an email. the worst reader ever was the icing on the boring cake.