About the Authors
"For more than a decade, innovation has been practically synonymous with the latest cool gadget. In the new era, innovation will not be about cool. It will be about profound change. It will convey breakthrough solutions for a peak world population of nearly 10 billion people, all striving for a better life, all facing the realities of a crowded and constrained planet."
From The Conclusion of The Other Side of Innovation
VIJAY GOVINDARAJAN (known as V. G.) and CHRIS TRIMBLE are on the faculty at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. They have dedicated the past ten years to studying a single challenge, one that vexes even the best-managed corporations: how to execute an innovation initiative.
In 2005, they published the international bestseller Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators—From Idea to Execution. The Wall Street Journal published a Top Ten Recommended Reading list that placed Ten Rules alongside well-known titles including Freakonomics, The Tipping Point, and Blink. Strategy & Business magazine recognized Ten Rules as the best strategy book of the year.
V. G. and Chris have published together in the Harvard Business Review, the MIT Sloan Management Review, the California Management Review, BusinessWeek, Fast Company, and the Financial Times. Their article “Organizational DNA for Strategic Innovation” won the Accenture Award for the best article of the year in the California Management Review.
Most recently, V. G. and Chris worked with Jeff Immelt, chairman and CEO of General Electric, to write “How GE is Disrupting Itself,” the Harvard Business Review article that introduced the notion of reverse innovation—any innovation that is adopted first in the developing world.
V. G. is the Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business and the founding director of Tuck’s Center for Global Leadership. He was the first professor in residence and chief innovation consultant at General Electric.
V. G. has been named as: Outstanding Faculty (BusinessWeek, in its “Guide to the Best B-Schools”), Top Ten Business School Professor in Corporate Executive Education (BusinessWeek), “Superstar” Management Thinker from India (BusinessWeek), Top Five Most Respected Executive Coach on Strategy (Forbes), Top 50 Management Thinker (The London Times), and Outstanding Teacher of the Year (MBA students).
V. G. has worked directly with 25 percent of the Fortune 500 corporations including Boeing, Coca-Cola, Colgate, Deere, FedEx, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, J.P. Morgan Chase, Johnson & Johnson, New York Times, Procter & Gamble, Sony, and Walmart. He is a regular keynote speaker in CEO Forums and major conferences including the World Innovation Forum and BusinessWeek CEO Forum.
V. G. received his doctorate and his MBA, with distinction, from the Harvard Business School.
CHRIS’S career mixes rigorous academic research with hard-nosed practical experience. His interest in innovation within large organizations developed early in his career, when he was a submarine officer in the U.S. Navy.
Chris is a frequent speaker on the topic of innovation and has spoken all over the world. He has also advised dozens of top corporations on their innovation challenges. Chris holds an MBA degree with distinction from the Tuck School and a bachelor of science degree with highest distinction from the University of Virginia.