Surveys by the Economist and many others show that the top of mind issue for most CEO and managers has shifted from cost reduction to revenue growth. As the world economy shifts from one of contraction to expansion, companies know that revenue growth is strictly dependent on their innovation process.

For the majority of companies, more than 25% of this year’s revenue are for products and services that did not exist 3 years ago. Moreover, the life-cycle of offerings is growing ever shorter. Sixty percent of companies report that their growth is hampered because the lead time of their innovation process takes too long and costs too much.

Companies understand the causes of long lead time and high cost in manufacturing, and its remedy using the Lean methodology. However, the causes of long lead time and high cost in innovation are not understood, nor is their remedy. This book, for the first time, explains the causes of long lead time and ineffective innovation, and provides a proven solution.

Conquering the Growth Challenge explains why it takes so long for innovations to reach the market and why they so often fail; and provides solutions for how to reduce time-to market and increase the success rate. It provides the complete foundation for reducing time-to-market of successful innovative offerings, applicable to any business, and is the first to provide quantitative links such that a thoughtful CEO or manager who implements the Fast Innovation process featured in this book can launch a new innovation, confident that it will meet its required delivery date. The solutions discussed in this book have already been applied in varying degrees by firms such as GE, 3M, Toyota and Microsoft.

In short, what you’ll get in this book is an answer to the challenge every company faces: how can we increase differentiation and competitive advantage while shortening time-to-market? At first glance, that sounds like an impossible goal because increased differentiation was historically accompanied by increased organisational and offering complexity—which often served to clog development pipelines. George provides the necessary implementation infrastructure and tools to achieve:

•Significantly faster and controllable time-to-market

•A highly differentiated product, service or experience

•Low cost of complexity and low cost operations

•Fast operational lead times