Secrets of the World’s Top Innovators

May 23, 2011 By Aminda

Booz & Company has recently released the results of their sixth annual Global Innovation 1000 study. The study has consistently shown that there is no statistically significant relationship between financial performance and innovation spending. However, the Consulting firm identifies what does matter, like the talent, knowledge, team structures, tools, and processes that combine to form a company’s distinct innovation strategy.

From the survey of the 1,000 public companies around the world that spend the most on research and development, Booz & Company identified three strategies that are most often utilized by these successful innovation companies.

Need Seekers actively and directly engage current and potential customers to shape new products and services based on superior end-user understanding, and strive to be the first to market with those new offerings.

Market Readers watch their customers and competitors carefully, focusing largely on creating value through incremental change and by capitalizing on proven market trends.

Technology Drivers follow the direction suggested by their technological capabilities, leveraging their investment in research and development to drive both breakthrough innovation and incremental change, often seeking to solve the unarticulated needs of their customers via new technology.

They are quick to point out that none of the strategies are better than another; rather it is more about selecting the innovation strategy that best aligns with the company’s overall business strategy. And regardless of the path taken, the study found that innovation leaders utilized a common set of innovation capabilities: ideation, project selection, project development and commercialization.

For the first year, the study asked industry leaders to select the three companies they considered to be the most innovative in the world. This addition served to reinforce the lack of correlation between R&D spending and innovation results, since only three of the companies on the “10 most innovative” list also appear among the year’s top 10 spenders.

Find the Top 10 list and the complete report from the study at Booz & Company’s Strategy+Business site.


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