Innovation Management - Creating value with innovation management.

An EU benchmark of national innovation capabilities has the United States out in front with some European countries falling behind the emerging economies. The US Government on the other hand is deeply concerned about its innovation capability. Haydn Shaughnessy asks if the benchmarks give us a way to rethink innovation.

Strategyn, an innovation management consulting firm, recently released the results of an independent study that measured the effectiveness of its patented Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) methodology for launched products or services in the marketplace. The study found that products and services launched with ODI had greater success in the marketplace than products launched with traditional forms of innovation. The success rate for products launched using ODI was 86 percent, while traditional innovation methods yielded an average success rate of 17 percent.

Companies hoping to collaborate with other firms to create new innovative business opportunities will benefit from a new report by the University of Cambridge. The study tackles question of how to get help with open innovation.

Total R&D spending among the world’s top spenders on innovation dropped in 2009 for the first time in the 13 years studied, according to the 2010 Global Innovation 1000, the sixth annual study of corporate innovation spending, released today by global management consulting firm Booz & Company. The study revealed that the 1,000 companies that spent the most on research and development decreased their total R&D spending by 3.5% to $503 billion in 2009. This followed a relatively strong 2008 during which R&D spending continued to grow despite the recession.

While the US and Japan remain leaders in global science and technology innovation, increased competition from growth markets, notably China, suggests a changing landscape. According to a new report by the Global Markets Institute at Goldman Sachs, research and development spending in Asia surpassed EU levels in 2005, and is likely to overtake US levels in the next five years, thanks primarily to striking growth in R&D investment in China. The new geography of global innovation is further supported by the globalization of higher education, particular in science and engineering (S&E) fields.

Is your company paying close enough attention to the hundreds of smaller cities in emerging markets, where one-third of the world’s population currently lives? After a year-long global research effort, the Boston Consulting Group has released a comprehensive report, which they call a “wake-up call for companies under pressure to grow.”

The most recent European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS, 2009), ranks Denmark among the top-five innovation leaders, an impressive number that hides a rather grim reality. Denmark and two other of the countries in the top-five, Sweden and the United Kingdom, have not experienced annual growth in innovation performance and thus are the slow growers among the innovation leaders. In Denmark’s case, one of the reasons for this is that Danish companies are not entering into external collaborations, according to Jeffrey Saunders, Futurist at the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies, in a presentation to the Danes Abroad Business Group Online forum. The EIS shows an 8% decline over the last five years in the collaboration among innovative SMEs in Denmark.

The 2010 Technology and Innovation Report – Enhancing Food Security in Africa Through Science, Technology and Innovation – focuses on the challenges of improving agricultural performance in Africa and the role of technology and innovation in raising agricultural production and incomes of all farmers, including smallholder farms.

Last week McKinsey released their 2010 innovation survey. It makes a very interesting read and is based on a survey of over 2000 respondents from several industries. In the report only 39 percent of respondents say that their companies are good at commercializing new products or services.

With the focus worldwide on stabilizing the global economy and jumpstarting growth, a strong emphasis on directed pro-innovation policies can be a rainbow of hope for nations worldwide. Third in the series, the Global Innovation Index and Report 2009-10, that was published earlier this year by business school INSEAD in partnership with India’s Confederation Industry (CII), has stressed the importance of innovation in country competitiveness and development strategies and is clearly one of the most comprehensive assessments of innovation-this time covering 132 nations.

Denmark, Finland, Germany, Sweden and the UK are the innovation leaders with innovation performance well above other EU member states according to the recently released ninth edition of the European Innovation Scoreboard. The report also shows that the majority of EU member states until 2008 were steadily improving their innovation performance, economic crisis may, however, threaten to hamper this progress.

Today’s business leaders view innovation as a means to fight the financial crisis, however a new European study by INSEAD and Logica warns that the link between the money spent and the final result is broken. Their findings show that the majority of business leaders commit substantial resources to innovation, but only nine percent use ROI as a measure of innovation. What’s more, the Nordic countries achieved the lowest rating when it comes to measuring and implementing innovation.

The paradigm of innovation as driven primarily by technology and science is passé. A new paradigm is emerging, with the publication of success stories of companies innovating through other ways. The Danish and Finnish governments jointly funded a study into the new nature of innovation, as a contribution to the OECD’s work on innovation strategy. Innovationmanagement.se asked the FORA team behind the report to present the highlights. FORA is a research and analysis division under the Danish Authority for Enterprise and Construction