Vijay Govindarajan

“Of all possible resources that a firm might posses, its knowledge base has perhaps the greatest ability to serve as a source of sustainable differentiation and hence competitive advantage.”

“The more you hardwire a company on total quality management, [the more] it is going to hurt breakthrough innovation... The mindset that is needed, the capabilities that are needed, the metrics that are needed, the whole culture that is needed for discontinuous innovation, are fundamentally different.”

“Organizations are not designed for innovation. Quite the contrary, they are designed for ongoing operations.”

“Innovation plans, by contrast, are loaded with assumptions. Sure, some hard facts are available, but more is unknown than known. The past is no longer precedent. Thus, the innovator's job cannot be to deliver a proven result; it must be to discover what is possible, that is, to learn, by converting assumptions into knowledge as quickly and inexpensively as possible.”

“A reverse innovation is any innovation that is adopted first in the developing world.”

“Inside a big experiment, there are little experiments.”

“The innovation leader’s job is to execute a disciplined experiment.”