This book has its roots in our long careers as innovation management practitioners, consultants, facilitators, and scholars. For over 20 years, the International Association for Product Development (IAPD) has provided a venue where leading innovators could gather for discussion, learning, and experimentation in the field of innovation. In the early 1990s, the IAPD began exploring new product development processes and practices, which inspired Beebe to co-author the book New Product Development for Dummies (Wiley Publishing Inc., 2007) together with Robin Karol. As time went on, IAPD became a leader in discovering the new frontiers of innovation. Our experience with this group of leading innovators – Beebe as co-director and then director, Jean-Philippe as the lead academic at a number of IAPD workshops – helped us to recognize that, once the early questions were resolved, the need for high-level oversight and leadership became increasingly urgent for sustained innovation performance. We observed significant differences between companies in the level of management commitment to innovation as well as in the way they allocated responsibilities for innovation and created innovation-enhancing mechanisms. This led us to recognize that, alongside individual innovation leadership – the topic of Jean-Philippe's latest book Innovation Leaders (Jossey-Bass, 2008) – companies need to deploy an organizational form of innovation leadership, or what we describe in this book as innovation governance.

One of the first examples of innovation governance in action that we studied was at DSM, the Dutch life sciences and materials sciences company. Rob van Leen, DSM's chief innovation officer, agreed to open his Innovation Center to us and respond to our questions. This research resulted in an IMD case study, DSM: Mobilizing the Organization to Grow through Innovation, written in 2009 by Jean-Philippe together with IMD research associate Daria Tolstoy (IMD-3-2111). We would like to thank Rob van Leen for being so supportive and for encouraging us to pursue our investigations on this important topic. Chapter 10 highlights DSM's current innovation governance system.

Conscious of the need to document and assess the various organizational models of governance we had observed in our practice, Jean-Philippe initiated a research survey that IMD's learning technologies specialist, Alberto Brigneti, helped structure and put online. We thank him for his assistance. This survey provided a first glimpse of the way companies allocate their innovation management responsibilities. The results of this survey, which are summarized in Chapters 5 and 6, were presented by Jean-Philippe and discussed in an executive roundtable on innovation governance organized by Beebe at IAPD for its members. The meeting was held at Harley-Davidson in Milwaukee, WI, in September 2009. At the roundtable, several of the companies whose stories are the focus of chapters in this book offered their models of innovation governance as examples of how leading innovators are structuring this newly recognized task. We owe a great debt to these companies, which included DSM, Corning, and IBM, as well as to Sikorsky and Medrad which also presented their models, and to the companies that joined in the discussion – Harley-Davidson, Caterpillar, Eli Lilly, Herman Miller, and Shell.

Jean-Philippe, meanwhile, started discussing innovation leadership and governance issues at management development seminars held at IMD business school in Lausanne, Switzerland. The program directors of these seminars – Professor Ralf Seifert for Mastering the Technology Enterprise; Professor Leif Sjoblom for the Advanced Executive Development Program; and particularly Professor Bill Fischer and MIT Professor Charlie Fine for Driving Strategic Innovation – keenly supported Jean-Philippe's teaching experiments on this new innovation governance topic. So did Professor David Robertson, who shared his experience with governance issues in a number of companies. Their support proved invaluable and encouraged him to initiate this book-writing project, which Beebe joined without hesitation.

Wiley's executive commissioning editor, Rosemary Nixon, and her staff, as well as her US Jossey-Bass colleague, Kathe Sweeney, accepted our book project with enthusiasm. We thank them for their continued support and confidence.

The project started with an intense two-day workshop together with Beebe and IMD Professor of Leadership and Management Development, Preston Bottger. Preston helped us define and frame some of the essential concepts of innovation governance. We owe a great deal to him for generously sharing with us some of his leadership development experience. His insights have helped us to define innovation governance in Chapter 1 and pay attention to the importance of clarifying one's own model of leadership, as summarized in Chapter 14.

We would like also to express our gratitude to innovation and management thinkers who have shared some of their concepts: Bob Tomasko in Chapters 2 and 14; MIT Professor Charlie Fine in Chapter 3; and innovation bloggers Paul Hobcraft and Jeffrey Phillips in Chapter 5. They have been and remain an invaluable source of inspiration for us.

This book would not have been possible without the enthusiastic support of busy executives and innovators who took the time to talk with us and help us build their stories to provide inspiration and examples for their innovation peers. As always, the credit goes to all those whose generous help allowed us to draw what we hope will be an extremely useful picture of how the task of governing innovation can be accomplished in a variety of companies. Any mistakes that may remain in our interpretation of their governance system are wholly ours.

In particular, we would like to thank Brigitte Laurent at Solvay for her insights in Chapters 3 and 5; Paul Aspinwall, a frequent participant and speaker at IAPD workshops, and Greg Golden for their help on IBM in Chapter 7; and Bruce Kirk, also a frequent speaker and participant at the IAPD, for his help on Corning in Chapter 8.

Our research has also allowed us to delve deeply into the governance system of several multinational companies that have generously given us access to their CEO and C-suite officers. These high-level contacts confirmed us in our belief that nothing can replace senior leaders' firm and personal commitment to innovation.

At Nestlé, covered in Chapter 9, our gratitude goes to CEO, Paul Bulcke; CTO, Werner Bauer; executive vice president in charge of all strategic business units, Patrice Bula; head of Nestlé's Research Center, Thomas Beck; and head of the System Technology Center, Alfred Yoakim. We also appreciate the efforts of assistant vice president for corporate affairs, Ferhat Soygenis, in helping us edit Chapter 9. Finally we wish to express our appreciation to Professor Kamran Kashani who wrote the IMD case Innovation and Renovation: The Nespresso Story from which large excerpts are reproduced.

At DSM, the subject of Chapter 10, we would like to thank CEO Feike Sijbesma and, once again, Rob van Leen, for his willingness to update us on DSM's innovation governance system.

At Tetra Pak, described in Chapter 11, we are indebted to a number of people for their wholehearted support of this book project: CEO, Dennis Jönsson; CTO, Michael Grosse; senior technologist, Stefan Andersson; and one of Tetra Pak's first innovation advocates, Richard Tonkin.

At Michelin, covered in Chapter 12, our gratitude goes to CEO, Jean-Dominique Senard, who was willing to share his views on and hopes for his brand new innovation governance system, knowing full well that it was still a work in progress. We were guided in our investigation by Michelin's CTO, Terry Gettys; head of sustainable business development, Patrick Oliva; former head of research, Philippe Denimal; and organization development specialist, Pascal Thibault. We thank them all sincerely for their openness and support.

The job of co-authoring a book is always fraught with difficulty. We are therefore hugely grateful to IMD senior editor Lindsay McTeague whose patience and tact enabled us to realize what was needed to align styles and create a readable book. Her calm and reassuring attitude as she professionally edited our text helped us to overcome several moments of confusion and classic author despair.

Last but not least, we very much appreciate the warm encouragement and support from our spouses, Danièle Deschamps and Duncan Nelson, during these long solitary research and writing phases.