Managing Global Innovation: Frameworks for Integrating Capabilities around the World Hardcover – November 6, 2012

This book was required as a textbook in my multinational business class. I was pretty happy to have such a reasonable priced textbook!! Once I got past the preface and into the first chapter, I began getting into this book. It offers some valuable insights into innovating on a global scale.

Nice product.

The title of this review is taken from a brilliant Foreword in which Cesare Mainardi suggests that this book explains "how to conceive, build, and hone a global innovation capability that is enduring, practical, and rooted in the realities of both global competition and a company's particular approach to its market." In my opinion, this is a "must read" for leaders of companies that have that strategic objective but also for leaders of other companies that are part of the value chain of those companies that are now struggling with the challenges of managing global innovation. Yves Doz and Keeley Wilson provide in this remarkable volume several frameworks for integrating capabilities around the world.I commend Doz and Wilson on their brilliant use of several reader-friendly devices that include 17 "Sidebars," mini-commentaries on real-world situations that illustrate the given business principle. For example, "Tata Communications: A Globally Integrated Model" (Pages 10-12), Nokia: Attracting Leading Edge Research" (50-51), and "Sapphire: Strong Project Management Delivering Success" (162-164). These and other resources throughout the book can help business leaders to respond effectively to a daunting challenge, "building a global innovation capability that relies on complex knowledge will be difficult, though not impossible." What to do? Doz and Wilson propose a three-step process and explain how to complete each step.These are among the passages of greatest interest and value to me. They suggest the range of subjects on which Doz and Wilson concentrate through their lively and eloquent narrative.o Why Companies Can't Innovate Globally (Pages 5-10)o Key Capabilities Remains at Home (21-22)o Sidebar 2-1, "HP Labs India: Experiencing via Immersion in a New Context" (38-40)o Innovation Footprints: A Value-Based Approach (57-66)o Accelerated Learning Experiments (74-76)o Sidebar 3-3, "Fuji Xerox: From Market Access Joint Venture to Key Innovation Hub" (79-80)o Barriers to Optimizing Communication (95-103)o Sidebar 5-1, "Xerox: From a Culture of Secrecy to Open Knowledge Sharing ancd Reuse" (108-110)o Transferring and Integrating Complex Knowledge: The Role of Cosmopolitan Managers (123-127)o Global Innovation Projects: Success in Three Phases (147-152)o Collaborative Identification (174-176)o Sidebar 7-1, "IBM's Collaboratories" (178-179)o Sidebar 7-2, "Boeing: From Dreamliner to Nightmare Project" (183-185)o Organizing the Innovation Footprint (203-210)o Innovation Needs to Follow the Brains (222-223)No brief commentary such as mine can possibly do full justice to the scope and depth of material that Yves Doz and Keeley Wilson provide in this volume but I hope that I have at least suggested why I think so highly of them and their work. Also, I hope that those who read this commentary will be better prepared to determine whether or not they wish to read the book and, in that event, will have at least some idea of how the information, insights, and wisdom could perhaps be of substantial benefit to them and to their own organization.

I thoroughly recommend `Managing Global Innovation' to anyone who has an interest in what continuing globalisation means for how firms need to organise and structure themselves to remain competitive. Taking this huge, complex subject, the authors have produced a well thought-out, strongly argued and informative response that is the product of field research carried out over a long period of time.The pacy style of writing (refreshingly jargon-free) holds the reader's interest as you are guided through a penetrating analysis of each of the challenges to globally integrated innovation, and then given the solutions needed to overcome them. The two appendices provide helpful context into the drivers of knowledge dispersion and how the nature of innovation has changed since the mid 1970s.For me a brilliantly used feature of the book, and one that greatly enhances the force of the narrative, is the way examples from the well known companies they worked with are inserted to illustrate the authors' conclusions. Planted in the text of every chapter in stand out boxes, these examples draw the complex threads of the argument together and form a pertinent and striking illustration of the actions necessary to bring about a desired result. And unlike so many business books, the examples do not only illustrate how a particular tactic is a necesssary step towards building an organisation that encourages innovation, but also the where, why and how it could fail to do so.Many managers reading this book will immediately recognise challenges their own organisations have faced but usually failed to resolve, despite the deployment of considerable human and financial resources. However, after absorbing the book's messages, and armed with the clear road map provided by the authors, they should feel confident of being able to make the strategic choices that could finally put them on the road to successful global innovation.I foresee this well researched and beautifully written book becoming a highly influential and thought provoking contribution to an increasingly critical problem for so many organisations; one that has long been recognised,and on which much ink has been spilled without producing any widely applicable solutions. Firmly rooted in real life business cases, this book may finally put the argument to rest by offering global companies strategies that actually work.

The authors have successfully distilled a large amount of original, painstaking research with global companies in a number of diverse sectors, into practical, and well-articulated principles that change the way managers and strategists can approach innovation - not just in its more expected fields of innovation, but also in refocussing thinking on ways to optimise existing knowledge networks in any organisation and function within multinationals. For example these principles are just as valuable when implementing complex risk control functions across multiple jurisdictions in a financial institution where the product and expertise footprint varies widely, as they may ensure complex knowledge sources are leveraged to develop new products and services.This is a seminal example of how to develop complex and diverse examples and experiences (including the opportunity to learn from their mistakes) from some of the world's most successful global companies into ergonomic tools and methods that managers at all levels with cross border and cross cultural objectives can leverage to optimise the effectiveness of their strategy and business structure.This is critical reading for any international manager with aspirations to effect real, valuable change.