Like the solution found in any good murder mystery, Markham and Mugge apply the precision of a forensic scientist in Traversing the Valley of Death to solve the Corporate Jungle mystery that traps Breakthrough Innovation in the Valley.  I am a Valley Girl. I’ve been in the Valley of Death so many times in my corporate career that I am surprised I haven’t come back yet as a cat! But still I return – because coming out of the Valley to the other side is the prize worth winning.

For Millennia, the standard response when approaching the Valley of Death has been prayer. Steve Markham and Paul Mugge aren’t saying that’s a bad idea, but they add greatly to the understanding of the situation, and go beyond academic knowledge to provide templates for building bridges and negotiating pitfalls. Steve began his academic pursuit of this understanding (with Center for Innovation Management Studies funding) 30 years ago while a graduate student at Purdue University studying the decisions and tactics used by “champions” to support technological innovation in industry. His career as an innovation researcher and practitioner/consultant is ongoing, and his knowledge of the Valley is deep and well-documented in this book. Paul’s experiences at IBM as an internal “turn-around” warrior during the early 1990s honed his suspicion of easy fixes to the problems encountered in traversing the Valley. Paul continues to test his ability to find reliable paths through the Valley by working closely with CIMS’ sponsoring firms as a coach and mentor to leaders of innovation. This is a book to keep close at hand.

When we started down the path of building a disruptive innovation capability, our initial benchmarking efforts revealed that a systematic approach to “Big” innovation was not at all commonplace. Through our engagement with NC State University’s Center for Innovation Management Studies, we became aware of the System for Industrial Innovation and have begun embedding it in the fabric of our organization. The System represents a simple and comprehensive way of establishing operational rigor for an activity frequently seen as intangible and serendipitous.  It has become key in our drive to establish a robust culture of innovation at Kelly.

Almost three decades ago, the National Science Foundation Industry/ University Cooperative Research Centers Program (I/UCRC) launched its first non-engineering I/UCRC, the Center for Innovation Management Studies (CIMS). Through the able leadership of Dr. Al Bean it become an unqualified success by showing how to bridge academic innovation studies with industry commercial practice. With the publication of Traversing the Valley of Death, Markham and Mugge have continued CIMS’s pioneering tradition by utilizing its large data base to produce a book, complete with useful worksheets, that clearly and concretely explains how cutting-edge research can be translated into commercialized products, processes or services. I believe this is a guide that university researchers, entrepreneurs and innovation executives will find very informative.

What an outstanding approach to managing innovation! This book is a must-read for senior level organizational leaders if only to survive this highly competitive global economy. The authors present a step by step guide to implement breakthrough innovation, covering the entire innovation life cycle: starting with innovation strategy planning and development – converting ideas into opportunities and creating the compelling business case, and completing the life cycle with adoption and implementation of the innovation product(s).

The use of Big Data for Discovery activities in the front-end of innovation and the tool kit provided offer valuable project and program management processes, tools and techniques to successfully traverse the Valley of Death, Hence fully implement breakthrough innovation. I highly endorse the breakthrough innovation approach presented in this book and encourage readers who haven’t tried CIMS System for Industrial Innovation in their shops, to get it and start utilizing the System. We need to create the innovator mindset in our shops; and the authors’ breakthrough innovation approach is the best tool to get us past the Valley of Death, and into implementation of innovative products.

As an innovation leader,  I know the odds for mature companies to realize the benefits of breakthrough innovations are high; 1 in 10 would be outstanding! The wisdom and methodology in this book is a veritable survival guide to “traverse this Valley of Death” and come out the other side! Markham and Mugge are to innovation what Lewis and Clark were to North America – teaching us how to identify and use the local flora and fauna (Chapter 1-3), to translate the native’s language (Chapter 4-5), and to draw the maps to guide us safely across the new territory (Chapter 6-7). Using the proven and systematic processes presented in this book, established companies can successfully and repeatedly generate top-line growth from disruptive innovation in products and services.