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SPOTLIGHT ON THE EFFECTIVE ORGANIZATION

Stop the Innovation Wars

by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble•

Included with this full-text Harvard Business Review article:

Idea in Brief—the core idea

1 Article Summary

3 Stop the Innovation Wars

Tensions between your

innovation team and core

operations can derail your

company’s growth initiatives.

Here’s how to end those

battles.

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S P O T L I G H T O N T H E E F F E C T I V E O R G A N I Z A T I O N


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Idea in Brief

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An innovation initiative is best organized as a partnership between a dedicated team and the group that handles ongoing opera-tions, the performance engine. Although conflicts between partners are inevitable, they can be managed, by following three steps:

Divide the labor. The performance engine should take on only tasks that flow in paral-lel with ongoing operations—along the same path, at the same pace, and with the same people in charge. All other tasks should be assigned to the dedicated team.

Assemble the dedicated team. Leaders must approach the dedicated team as if they were building a new company— from scratch. Breaking down existing work rela-tionships and creating new ones is an es-sential task, which outside hires can help expedite.

Mitigate the conflicts. The innovation leader must take a positive and collabora-tive approach to working with the perfor-mance engine and must be supported by an executive senior enough to prioritize the company’s long-term interests and adjudi-cate contests for resources.

SPOTLIGHT ON THE EFFECTIVE ORGANIZATION


by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble

harvard business review • july–august 2010 page 3

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Tensions between your innovation team and core operations can derail

your company’s growth initiatives. Here’s how to end those battles.

It was just an innocent comment. While work-ing with a client at a Fortune 500 company, weproposed the formation of a special group toexecute a new growth strategy. “For now, let’sjust refer to the group as the innovation team,”we suggested.

The client rolled his eyes. “Let’s call it any-thing but that,” he said. “What is this so-calledinnovation team going to do? Brainstorm? Sitaround being creative all day? Talk conde-scendingly about a superior organizational cul-ture? All of this while operating with neitherdiscipline nor accountability? All of this whilethe rest of us get the real work done?”

Wow. All it took was two words: innovationteam.

In our experience, innovation teams feel ahostility toward the people responsible for day-to-day operations that is just as biting. The richvocabulary of disdain includes bureaucratic, ro-botic, rigid, ossified, staid, dull, decaying, control-ling, patronizing...and just plain old. Such ani-mosity explains why most executives believethat any significant innovation initiative re-

quires a team that is separate and isolatedfrom the rest of the company.

But that conventional wisdom is worsethan simpleminded. It is flat wrong. Isolationmay neutralize infighting, but it also neutersinnovation.

The reality is that an innovation initiativemust be executed by a partnership that some-how bridges the hostilities—a partnership be-tween a dedicated team and what we call theperformance engine, the unit responsible forsustaining excellence in ongoing operations.Granted, such an arrangement seems, at firstglance, improbable. But to give up on it is togive up on innovation itself. Almost all innova-tion initiatives build directly upon a company’sexisting resources and know-how—brands, cus-tomer relationships, manufacturing capabili-ties, technical expertise, and so forth. So whena large corporation asks a group to innovate inisolation, it not only ends up duplicating thingsit already has but also forfeits its primary ad-vantage over smaller, nimbler rivals—its mam-moth asset base.

SPOTLIGHT ON THE EFFECTIVE ORGANIZATION•••Stop the Innovation Wars

page 4 harvard business review • july–august 2010

Over the past decade, we have examined doz-ens of innovation initiatives and identifiedsome best practices. In the process we builtupon foundational management theories suchas Jim March’s ideas about balancing explora-tion with exploitation, and Paul Lawrence andJay Lorsch’s argument that firms need to bothintegrate and differentiate corporate units. Wecame to the conclusion that the organizationalmodel we prescribe—a partnership between adedicated team and the performance engine—is surprisingly versatile. It can be adapted to ini-tiatives that span many innovation categories—sustaining and disruptive; incremental and radi-cal; competence enhancing and competencedestroying; new processes, new products, newbusinesses, and high-risk new ventures.

This article will show how to make the un-likeliest partnership work. There are threesteps. First, decide which tasks the perfor-mance engine can handle and which you’llneed to hand off to a dedicated team. Second,assemble the right dedicated team. Third, an-ticipate and mitigate strains in the partnership.Once you have taken these steps, you’ll be in agood position to actually execute on your greatideas.

How One Company Organized for GrowthIn most law offices, even in the internet era,you’ll find libraries full of weighty and majes-tic-looking books. The books contain rulingsfrom past cases. With each verdict, judges con-tribute to a massive body of precedents thatshape future decisions. (This is the system, atleast, in the United States and many othercountries.) Law students spend countlesshours mastering the intricacies and subtletiesof researching precedents.

West, a 135-year-old business, is one of sev-eral publishing houses whose mission is tomake legal research easier. After it was ac-quired by the Thomson Corporation, nowThomson Reuters, in 1996, West experiencedfive years of double-digit growth, as the indus-try made a rapid transition from printed booksto online databases. But in 2001 a major prob-lem arose. Once nearly all of West’s customershad converted to Westlaw, the company’s on-line offering, West’s growth plummeted tonear zero.

To restart growth, West set its sights on ex-panding its product line. By studying its cus-

tomers—law firms, corporate law offices, andlaw schools, among others—and how theyworked, West saw that lawyers had no conve-nient access to many key sources of informa-tion. For example, to examine legal strategiesin past cases, law firms were sending runnersto courthouses to dig through dusty archivesand photocopy old briefs—documents writtenby lawyers for judges, often to summarize theirarguments.

Starting with an online database of briefs,West proceeded to launch a series of new digi-tal products. By 2007, West had restored its or-ganic growth to nearly 7% annually—quite anaccomplishment since its customer base wasgrowing much more slowly.

An expansion into databases for differentkinds of documents does not seem, at firstglance, as if it would have been a stretch forWest. But Mike Wilens, then the CEO, and hishead of product development, Erv Barbre, im-mediately saw that the briefs project, becauseof its size, complexity, and unfamiliarity, wasbeyond the capabilities of West’s performanceengine. Some kind of special team was needed.At the same time, Wilens and Barbre were con-fident that portions of the project could betackled by West’s existing staff. They just hadto make sure the two groups worked well to-gether. Ultimately, the new briefs offering suc-ceeded because Wilens and Barbre built an ef-fective partnership between a dedicated teamand the performance engine, following thethree steps we’ve outlined.

Divide the LaborStep one in forming the partnership is to de-fine the responsibilities of each partner. Natu-rally, you want to assign as much as you can tothe performance engine. It already exists andworks well. But caution is due. You need to re-alistically assess what the performance enginecan handle while it maintains excellence in on-going operations.

The proper division of labor can span a widerange—from 10/90, to 50/50, to 90/10 splits. Itdepends on the nature of the initiative and theperformance engine’s capabilities. So how doyou decide?

The performance engine has two essentiallimitations. The first is straightforward. Anytask that is beyond the capabilities of the indi-viduals within the performance engine mustbe assigned to the dedicated team. The second

Vijay Govindarajan ([email protected]) is the Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business and founding director of the Center for Global Lead-ership at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. He was General Electric’s first professor in residence and chief inno-vation consultant. Chris Trimble ([email protected]) is on the faculty at Tuck and is an expert on innovation within established organi-zations. Govindarajan and Trimble are the authors of The Other Side of Innova-tion—Solving the Execution Challenge (Harvard Business Review Press, 2010).

Stop the Innovation Wars•••SPOTLIGHT ON THE EFFECTIVE ORGANIZATION


limitation is less obvious. It involves work rela-tionships. What Person A and Person B can dotogether is not just a function of A’s skills andB’s skills. It is also a function of the way A andB are accustomed to working together. As longas A and B are working inside the performanceengine, their work relationship is extremelydifficult to change. It is reinforced daily by thedemands of ongoing operations. BMW wasconfronted with this second limitation when itdesigned its first hybrid vehicle. (See the side-bar “Why BMW Didn’t Reinvent the Wheel.”)

Therefore, the performance engine shouldtake on only tasks that flow along the samepath from person to person that ongoing op-erations do—at the same pace and with thesame people in charge. To ask more of theperformance engine is too disruptive. It em-beds conflicts between innovation and ongo-ing operations so deeply within the perfor-mance engine that they become impossible tomanage.

At West, Wilens and Barbre recognized thatalthough product development staffers haddeep expertise in judicial decisions—such asMiranda v. Arizona, Brown v. Board of Educa-tion, Roe v. Wade, and thousands more—theyhad no experience in gathering briefs, whichwere scattered throughout countless court-houses and were much harder to track and or-ganize than decisions were. A complicatingfactor was scale. There can be dozens of briefsfor every judicial decision. The dedicatedteam, at the very least, had to take responsi-bility for locating and acquiring the briefs—and would need a few outside experts to beeffective.

More critically, Wilens and Barbre saw thatthe briefs project as a whole would be inconsis-tent with the work relationships within West’sproduct development group. Composed ofabout 50 legal experts, the group worked on afew dozen small initiatives at a time. The typi-cal project was an improvement to the West-law database that involved only two or threepeople for up to a few weeks. The group wasnonhierarchical, and the individuals within itdid not depend heavily on one another. In fact,during a given project, a product developer’smost important work relationship was likely tobe cross-functional, with a peer in the informa-tion technology group.

The briefs project was much larger. At itspeak, it involved 30 people full-time. The prod-

uct developers needed to work together in anunfamiliar manner. Each needed to take on aspecialized role as part of a tightly structured,close-knit project team. Asking the developersto operate in both modes at once would havebeen disruptive and confusing for all involved.Therefore Wilens and Barbre assigned nearlythe entire product development task to a dedi-cated team.

However, they assigned the marketing andsales tasks to the performance engine. Market-ing and selling briefs was not much differentfrom marketing and selling Westlaw. The buy-ers were the same, and the value propositionwas easy to explain. The work could simply beadded to West’s existing marketing and salesprocesses. It would flow along the same path,at the same pace, and with the same people incharge. The sales and marketing teams were acomponent of the performance engine thatcould do double duty—a subset we refer to asthe shared staff.

Assemble the Dedicated TeamOnce the labor has been divided and the re-quired skill sets have been identified, the prin-ciples for assembling the dedicated team areuncomplicated. First, choose the best peopleyou can get, from any source (internal trans-fers, external hires, even small acquisitions).Then, organize the team in a way that makesthe most sense for the task at hand. Tackle theprocess as if you were building a new companyfrom the ground up. This was the approachLucent took in launching a new unit that

Questions to AskWhen Dividing the Labor1. Does my company already have the needed skills for all aspects of the project?2. What portions of the innovation initiative are consistent with the existing work relationships in the performance engine?

When Assembling the Dedicated Team1. What is the right mix of insiders and outsiders?2. How should the team be structured differently from the performance engine?3. How should the team be measured and incentivized?

As You Manage the Strains on the Partnership1. Is there a tone of mutual respect?2. Are resource conflicts resolved proactively?3. Is the shared staff giving sufficient attention to the innovation initiative?



quickly grew to $2 billion in annual revenues.(See the sidebar “Why Lucent Engineered aService Business from Scratch.”)

Alas, these principles are easy to state but ex-tremely difficult to follow. Companies have apernicious habit of creating subunits that be-have just like the rest of the company, asthough a genetic code has been passed fromparent to offspring. We think of such subunitsas little performance engines, and they quicklybring innovation initiatives to a standstill.

The most frequent source of the problem isthe instinct to populate dedicated teams en-tirely with insiders. This is understandable. It’snatural to think about who you know beforethinking about skills you need. Insiders areeasy to find, often cheaper to “hire,” and seemless risky because they’re known commodities.They also offer a critical benefit: Because oftheir familiarity with the organization andcredibility within it, they can help mitigateconflicts between the dedicated team and theperformance engine.

The trouble is that a dedicated team com-posed entirely of insiders is practically guaran-teed to act like a little performance engine. Forone thing, everyone has the same biases andinstincts, grounded in the history of a singlecompany. Furthermore, work relationships aresticky. As noted earlier, employees who have

worked together for years have a hard time al-tering the way they interact.

Building an effective dedicated team re-quires breaking down existing work relation-ships and creating new ones. Including someoutsiders, even just one in three, is a powerfulexpedient. Outsiders have no existing work re-lationships to break down. They must formnew ones from scratch. As a bonus, outsidersnaturally challenge assumptions because theirbiases and instincts are rooted in the experi-ences of other companies.

Managers can also accelerate the process ofbreaking down and re-creating work relation-ships by writing new job descriptions, invent-ing new and unfamiliar titles, and explicitlyshifting the balance of power within the team.Shifting that balance is important because it israrely the case that a company’s traditionalpower center (say, engineering) should alsodominate the dedicated team (if, for example,customers for the innovation initiative willcare more about a new product’s look than itsperformance).

Selecting the right people and forming newwork relationships are the foundational stepsin building an effective dedicated team, but itis also important to pay attention to otherforces that shape behaviors. Beyond new workrelationships, dedicated teams frequently re-quire performance metrics, incentives, and cul-tural norms that differ from those of the per-formance engine.

West built a dedicated team that was distinctfrom its existing product development staff,choosing a roughly 50/50 mix of insiders andoutsiders. The company acquired a small busi-ness that had assembled on microfiche a collec-tion of valuable briefs, including the very firstbrief filed before the U.S. Supreme Court. Withit, West brought on board about a dozen peo-ple who knew a great deal about briefs andhad no work relationships with the West team.

The leader of the briefs effort, Steve Ander-son, treated the process of turning the mix ofinsiders and outsiders into a structured team asa zero-based effort. Rather than drawing onany of West’s norms for how work gets done(who’s responsible for what, who has what de-cision rights, and so forth), he simply gatheredeveryone and said, “Here we are. This is ourtask. How should we make it happen?” Ofcourse, the way to organize the effort was notobvious on day one. Innovation initiatives are

Case Study: Why BMW Didn’t Reinvent the Wheel At the heart of every hybrid automobile lies a regenerative brake. Traditional brakes dissipate the energy produced by a vehicle’s motion, generating friction and useless heat. Regenerative brakes, by contrast, capture the energy and put it back to work. An electrical generator built into the brake recharges the hy-brid’s massive batteries as the car slows.

Chris Bangle, then chief of design at BMW, was discouraged by slow progress early in the company’s first effort to de-sign a hybrid vehicle, launched in 2007. The source of the problem, Bangle saw, had nothing to do with engineering prowess; BMW employed the right ex-perts. The problem lay in the company’s formal structure and processes. Under its

well-established design procedures, there was no reason for battery specialists to speak with brake specialists. There was no routine work flow between them.

Bangle ultimately decided to create a dedicated team to enable the deep collab-oration that was necessary among all component specialists involved in the re-generative brake design. He named it the “energy chain” team, and it succeeded in moving the project forward quickly. Al-though a dedicated team was required for this one aspect of vehicle design, all other aspects of BMW’s first hybrid launch—design, engineering, sales, mar-keting, distribution, and so forth—were handled by its performance engine.



ambiguous. As Anderson’s team gained experi-ence, its structure evolved. It’s not essentialthat the dedicated team’s structure be per-fectly clear at the outset—only that it be un-constrained by the parent company’s past.

Working on Anderson’s dedicated team feltmuch different to the insiders who were partof it. They had less autonomy. They had to col-laborate with peers much more closely. Andthey knew that if they stumbled, they would beletting down not just themselves but theirteammates and their company. Some struggledwith the transition and chose to return to theperformance engine. While this may seem un-fortunate, it was actually a mark of Anderson’ssuccess. As a general rule, if all the insiders onthe dedicated team are comfortable, it must bea little performance engine. (Note that it’s alsoimportant for insiders to have a clear path toget back to the performance engine. Innova-tion initiatives frequently fail, and the individ-uals working on them sometimes don’t suc-ceed in their assignments. Companies thatcreate an out for insiders will find that they canmore easily motivate people to join a dedi-cated team.)

To further shape his dedicated team, Ander-son drew clear distinctions between its stan-dards and cultural values and those of the per-formance engine. West had long maintainedextremely high quality standards. For judicialdecisions—literally, the law itself—customersdemanded infallible information. Therefore,West had implemented multistep checks andsafeguards in loading documents into its data-base, a process that often started with scanninga physical document. With briefs, however,West needed to relax, slightly, from being ob-sessive about quality to being diligent. Thedauntingly high number of briefs made ex-haustive precautions impractical. Besides, cus-tomers cared more about convenience andavailability than perfection.

Anticipate and Mitigate the StrainsMake no mistake, nurturing a healthy partner-ship is challenging. Conflicts between innova-tion initiatives and ongoing operations are nor-mal and can easily escalate. Tensions becomerivalries, rivalries become hostilities, and hostil-ities become all-out wars in which the com-pany’s long-term viability is the clearest loser.

Differences between the two groups rundeep. Managers of the performance engine

seek to be efficient, accountable, on time, onbudget, and on spec. In every company, theirbasic approach is the same. It is to make everytask, process, and activity as repeatable andpredictable as possible. An innovation initia-tive, of course, is exactly the opposite. It is, bynature, nonroutine and uncertain. These in-compatibilities create a natural us-versus-themdynamic.

Leaders must counter conflicts by con-stantly reinforcing a relationship of mutual re-spect. Dedicated team leaders must rememberthat profits from the performance engine payfor innovation, and that their success dependson their ability to leverage its assets. They mustalso remember that pushback from the perfor-mance engine does not arise from laziness orfrom an instinctive resistance to change. Quitethe contrary—it arises from the efforts of goodpeople doing good work, trying to run ongoingoperations as effectively as possible. For theirpart, performance engine leaders must recog-nize that no performance engine lasts forever.To dismiss innovation leaders as reckless rebelsintent on undermining discipline in the pur-suit of an esoteric dream is to write off thecompany’s future.

For the partnership to work, the leader ofthe innovation initiative must set the righttone—positive and collaborative. Antagoniz-

Case Study: Why Lucent Engineered a Service Business from ScratchIn 2006, Lucent signed a deal to help a major telecommunications company transform its network. Four years earlier, such a huge service deal would have been hard to imagine.

Lucent’s historical strength was in products and in making technological breakthroughs in telecommunications hardware. But after the dot-com bust, Lu-cent needed a new source of growth and looked to services.

While the company had the necessary technical skills for services, it hardly had the organizational DNA. Technologists, not client relationship managers, held most of the power. And the pace of ser-vice operations was week to week, a stark departure from telecom hardware pur-

chasing cycles, which lasted years. As such, Lucent recognized that nearly the entire project needed to be executed by a dedicated team.

Lucent assembled that team as if it were building a new company. It hired an outside leader, a veteran of services from EDS, and several experienced service ex-ecutives. It adopted new HR policies that mimicked those of service companies. And it created a new performance score-card, one that emphasized workforce uti-lization, not product line ROI. It even tied compensation for service deliverers di-rectly to their utilization rates. The re-sult? In four years’ time, Lucent’s service group was generating more than $2 bil-lion in revenues.



ing the performance engine is a really badidea. The performance engine always wins inan all-out fight. It is, quite simply, bigger andstronger.

In fact, for precisely that reason, even thebest innovation leaders need help from highplaces. They must be directly supported by anexecutive senior enough to act in the long-term interests of the company, overriding theperformance engine’s short-term demandswhen necessary. This typically means that theinnovation leader must report two or more

levels higher up than managers with budgetsof a similar size. At WD-40, for example, aninnovation initiative relied on the direct in-volvement of the CEO. (See “How WD-40Minimized Frictions.”)

The senior executive to whom the innova-tion leader reports must be careful not to be acheerleader only for innovation. He or shemust also extol the virtues and importance ofthe performance engine and emphasize that along-run victory for the company requires thatboth sides win.

Together, the innovation leader and the se-nior executive must anticipate and proactivelyresolve conflicts. The clashes can be intense,but if the labor is properly divided betweenthe performance engine and the dedicatedteam, they’ll be manageable. The most com-mon conflict is over scarce resources. When thesum of activities, innovation plus ongoing op-erations, pushes the performance engine be-yond its resource constraints, choices must bemade.

Sometimes, this competition for scarce re-sources takes place through formal budgetingprocesses. Innovation leaders often find them-selves seeking explicit commitments from mul-tiple performance engine leaders. These nego-tiations are best resolved through a single planand budgeting process for the entire innova-tion initiative, with conflicts directly adjudi-cated by the senior executive.

In other cases, the competition is for the at-tention of the shared staff. It’s tempting for theinnovation leader to think that once the bud-get for an initiative is approved, the fight forresources is over. It is not. Each shared staffmember chooses how much energy to devoteto the new initiative every day. The innovationleader’s powers of persuasion are critical butmay not be adequate. Some companies createspecial incentives and targets for shared staffmembers to spur them to keep up with the de-mands of both innovation and ongoing opera-tions. Others charge the innovation initiativefor the shared staff’s time. That way, theshared staff treats the innovation leader morelike a customer than a distraction.

Emotional conflicts must also be managed.Sometimes resentments are grounded in sub-stantive business conflicts, like the possibilitythat the innovation initiative may cannibalizethe existing business. Senior executives mustargue clearly and consistently that the innova-

Case Study: How WD-40 Minimized FrictionsTo spur organic growth, Garry Ridge, CEO of WD-40, created a team to de-velop breakthrough products. He called it Team Tomorrow. It included newly hired research scientists and new outside partners. One of its first endeavors was developing the No Mess Pen, which made it easy to dispense small quantities of WD-40 in tight spaces. Though it doesn’t sound like a radical innovation, the technological challenges were steep, and the product took months to develop.

Historically, WD-40’s marketing team had handled product development, which generally entailed routine efforts to improve, renew, or repackage existing products. Now marketing took on the re-sponsibility of partnering with Team To-morrow to commercialize its offerings.

The sources of conflict in this partner-ship are not hard to identify. First, some marketing staffers felt that the attractive challenge of developing breakthrough products should have been theirs. Then there was a resource constraint. Would the marketing team expend its limited time and resources on experimental products or proven performers? Finally, marketing worried that Team Tomor-row’s new offerings would cannibalize ex-isting products.

Graham Milner and Stephanie Barry, the leaders of Team Tomorrow, overcame these conflicts by taking a collaborative

approach, particularly with the head of marketing. They shared information, es-tablished an open-door policy, and coor-dinated plans carefully with marketing, anticipating bottlenecks and resource conflicts. Knowing that such conflicts could be resolved only by the CEO, Mil-ner and Barry made sure Ridge was aware of them early, so that he could set priorities. When Ridge saw that it was necessary, he added staff to the market-ing team to make sure that it had suffi-cient bandwidth.

To signal the importance of the long term, Ridge carried a prototype of the pen with him wherever he went. This gave Team Tomorrow the attention it needed, but it also, at least initially, exac-erbated feelings among some in the mar-keting team that they had been left out. Ridge, Milner, and Barry all quickly saw just how important it was to celebrate the accomplishments of the core busi-ness’s team as well.

Ridge took other steps that contrib-uted to WD-40’s success. He made it clear that he would evaluate all involved em-ployees on their effectiveness in collabo-rating across organizational boundaries. And he was able to lessen the anxiety about cannibalization by collecting data and sharing analyses that showed that the No Mess Pen generated purely incre-mental sales.



tion initiative is nonetheless in the company’slong-term best interest and do as much as pos-sible to allay fears about job security.

At other times, resentments amount to sim-ple jealousy. The performance engine may feeldisenfranchised if the innovation initiative isviewed as the company’s most critical project.Or the dedicated team may feel marginalizedas pursuers of a quirky experiment. Some com-panies have countered the effects of envy bymaking “ability to work productively with in-ternal partners” a key assessment in individualperformance reviews.

The briefs project at West faced multiplekinds of conflict but overcame them. SteveAnderson provided the right type of leader-ship. He viewed the performance engine as hispartner, not his enemy. And he received con-stant support from two senior leaders, MikeWilens and Erv Barbre.

Wilens and Barbre paid close attention to re-source conflicts. When Barbre asked membersof the shared staff to make contributions to thebriefs effort, he also explicitly discussed whatwas on their plates and what could be deferred.In some cases, he hired contract labor to helpwith routine tasks, such as loading documents,to ensure that the priorities of both innovationand ongoing operations could be met.

Meanwhile, Anderson recognized the im-portance of galvanizing the shared staff. Heand his team got people on board by, amongother things, creating a skit based on thePerry Mason television series. It showed whata lawyer’s life was really like and why a prod-uct like a briefs database would be enor-mously valuable. Wilens and Barbre backedup his effort, in part by creating a special in-centive for the sales force to push the new of-fering. All three leaders monitored emotionaltensions. As the briefs project started to showsigns of success, they saw that some in theperformance engine felt as though they hadbeen left out of a real “glamour project.” Theleaders countered by reinforcing the impor-tance of the core business and by holdingevents at which they spread credit as widely

as possible, within both the dedicated teamand the performance engine.

The Unlikeliest Partnership Is ManageableThe reception of West’s briefs database ex-ceeded expectations. In fact, the company wasdeluged with queries about how quickly thedatabase would be expanded to include addi-tional legal specialties and jurisdictions. Thecompany followed with many more initiativeslike it, such as new databases of expert testi-mony and court dockets.

The organizational formula was not alwaysthe same for those initiatives. For example,when West pursued a product called PeerMon-itor, it assigned almost the entire job—devel-opment and commercialization—to the dedi-cated team. PeerMonitor provided data thatenabled law firms to benchmark their businessperformance against that of rivals. West choseto assign sales and marketing to the dedicatedteam because selling PeerMonitor required adifferent skill set and a longer cycle. The targetcustomer was also different: West sold most ofits offerings to law librarians, but PeerMonitorwas sold directly to managing partners. ThePeerMonitor sales force collaborated with theperformance engine’s sales force to coordinatean overall approach.

West’s example is one worthy of study. Thecompany succeeded where others have stum-bled because it saw that innovation is notsomething that happens either inside or out-side the existing organization, and that innova-tion does not require that an upstart fight theestablishment. Instead, innovation requires apartnership between a newly formed team andthe long-standing one.

While such partnerships are challenging,they are manageable. And they are indispens-able. Indeed, without them, innovation goesnowhere.

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