Which is more important: ideas or execution?

Survey after survey shows that most company executives believe they are far better at generating ideas than executing them. Despite the fact that the real leverages in the backend of innovation - in execution - most managers of obsess over the front end of the innovation process, on generating ideas. Once a high potential idea has been identified, a business plan has been written and refined, and a passionate leader has been assigned to run it, everyone assumes that the rest will be easy.

The authors have also identified six tendencies of established organizations that new ventures also typically face:

* Protecting funding for the new venture regardless of the performance of the parent company
* Establishing new organizational norms and policies that make sense for the new venture
* Overcoming tensions between the new venture and the existing company when those norms and policies conflict
* Affecting changes in the existing power structure required to support the new venture
* Engaging employees of the parent company in supporting the new venture and
* Recruiting talented managers from the parent company to work within the new venture