The Innovation Blog

There's been a lot of talk around Creative Realities lately about "The other side of innovation", both a compelling read by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble and a euphemism for the part of the innovation process that focuses on making real value out of great ideas.

In a recent HBR blog post, Govindarajan talked about how, on average, executives at Fortune 500 companies rated their ability to commercialize ideas a one (on a scale of one to 10). At the same time, their average rating for how well they generated ideas was a six.

It struck me that with all of the focus over the past few years on "The Fuzzy Front End" – structuring and implementing your Discovery engine – there is still quite a bit of fuzziness around the less-sexy back end that hasn't received a ton of attention.

So, in the spirit of turning our attention this way, I'm wondering what your perceptions are as to the major challenges to executing on new ideas. Why do you think the score on commercializing ideas was a one out of 10?

What are your stories about both the challenges of and successes with turning an organization's ideas into value-creating reality?

- By David Culton, Business Innovationist @davidculton