Innovation Prowess
Leadership Strategies for Accelerating Growth
George S. Day
A framework for achieving superior rates of organic growth
Achieving superior growth through innovation is a top strategic priority for all companies. Yet most management teams struggle to reach their firm’s ambitious growth targets and suffer slow growth. What distinguishes these growth laggards from growth leaders like IBM, Nike, LEGO, American Express, Amazon, and Samsung that realize their full potential for growth?
Wharton professor George S. Day shows that growth leaders use their innovation prowess to accelerate their growth at a faster rate. In this essential guide, Day reveals how to build this prowess by combining discipline in growth-seeking activities with an organizational ability to innovate. Day shows managers how to set a growth strategy that is realistic while still stretching the organization; search for the best growth opportunities along the full spectrum of 14 growth pathways; aim their growth-seeking activities toward the creation of new customer value; learn to profit from the uncertainty of innovation by successfully assessing and containing risk; build the organizational muscle to implement an ambitious growth strategy; and move faster from ideas to impact.
With the strategies, processes, and methods discussed in Innovation Prowess, leaders can build a tested and comprehensive strategy for driving organic growth year after year.
The Wharton Executive Essentials Series
The Wharton Executive Essentials series from Wharton Digital Press brings the ideas of the Wharton School’s thought leaders to you wherever you are. Inspired by Wharton’s Executive Education program, each book is authored by globally renowned faculty and offers a quick-reading, penetrating, and comprehensive summary of the knowledge leaders need to excel in today’s competitive business environment and capture tomorrow’s opportunities.
read more +About the Author
George S. Day
George S. Day is the Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor Emeritus at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He founded the Mack Institute for Innovation Management at the Wharton School, where he is presently... 
Praise for Innovation Prowess
“George Day has captured a concept that is relevant for all companies trying to increase their organic growth rate. His key insight is that growth leaders have developed both discipline and ability. It is akin to having brain and brawn; you have to have both to stay ahead.”
—Vijay Govindarajan, Professor, Tuck at Dartmouth College, and Coauthor, Reverse Innovation
“The book provides a valuable contribution to managing the fuzzy front end of product innovation—to deciding your innovation strategy, picking the most attractive areas to focus on, achieving competitive advantage via the right growth pathways, and driving new products to market. A must-read for every executive interested in fostering their firm’s innovation efforts.”
—Robert G. Cooper, Professor Emeritus, McMaster University, and Creator, Stage-Gate System
“Profitable growth is a priority and challenge for top management. Innovation is critical to sustainable organic growth in organizations. Marketing leaders should and can play a key role in helping drive innovation and growth, and George Day’s book is a little gem of insight and action for deploying successful growth strategies.”
—Dennis Dunlap, Chief Executive Officer, American Marketing Association
“This is the best book on innovation that I have read. As Day illustrates, innovation is messy and multifaceted, but requires a disciplined approach. This book concisely joins the dots of his and others’ experience to help managers create an organization that can repeatedly innovate and challenge itself to change and to create innovation for organic growth. This is done by clearly articulating what makes organizations into repeat innovators as well as the barriers to innovation, and within this, giving managers a set of questions to help them diagnose the innovation capability of their organization. It’s the answers to those questions rather than a template or the latest best practice that will continuously guide teams to improve their innovation prowess. In that way this book should set up a self-sustaining path to create self-sustaining innovation.”
—Robert N. Shaddock, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, TE Connectivity
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