Today Bruce Nussbaum shares some impressive insights and figures on his Innovation & Design blog at BusinessWeek. In his latest posting Bruce states by referring to Larry Keely (co-founder and president of the Doblin Group in Chicago) that:
“… innovation is beginning to give up its secrets.” He (Keely) said that today, companies can increase their innovation effectiveness by 35% to 70% or 9 to 17 times the norm. The norm, of course is the incredibly low 4.5% “hit” rate of successful innovation that companies generally have. Keeley said that “if you just use anthropologists, you can triple your innovation effectiveness by three times.”
This provides an interesting perspective on (and somehow confirms) a recent study by Booz Allen Hamilton which found that spending big bucks on research and development does not drive corporate competitiveness, earnings, or shareholder value. The reason: few companies have a fast or effective innovation engine.
Even though Innovation is not necessarily identical with R&D the correlation is there: Just imagine the outcome if Design Managers would be involved in innovations processes together with Anthropologists as well as Marketers, Brand Experts, Engineers, … at an early stage?
