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26.04.06

The most innovative organisations

The BusinessWeek and The Bosten Consulting Group present a survey on innovative organisations: ’To discover which companies innovate best — and why — BusinessWeek joined with The Boston Consulting Group to produce our second annual ranking of the 25 most innovative companies. More than 1,000 senior managers responded to the global survey, making it our deepest management survey to date on this critical issue.’

Samuel J. Palmisano (CEO of IBM) made an important point: “The way you will thrive in this environment is by innovating — innovating in technologies, innovating in strategies, innovating in business models.” So, innovation is not new. However, it currently shifts its focus from technology/product innovation to business model innovation, process and service innovations.

From the article: ’At the top of the list are the masters of many genres of innovation. Take Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL ), once again the creative king. To launch the iPod, says innovation consultant Larry Keeley of Doblin Inc., Apple used no fewer than seven types of innovation. They included networking (a novel agreement among music companies to sell their songs online), business model (songs sold for a buck each online), and branding (how cool are those white ear buds and wires?). Consumers love the ease and feel of the iPod, but it is the simplicity of the iTunes software platform that turned a great MP3 player into a revenue-gushing phenomenon.’

Top-management’s commitment is crucial. At P&G, this is one of the company’s strenghts: ’…, and in Alan G. Lafley, P&G has its own innovator-in-chief. Lafley sits in on all “upstream” R&D review meetings, 15 a year, that showcase new products. He also spends three full days a year with the company’s Design Board, a group of outside designers who offer their perspective on upcoming P&G products. “He’s sort of the chief innovation officer,” says P&G’s Huston. “He’s very, very involved.”

However, there are also many obstacles to get innovation right. Long development times, a lack of coordination, finding the appropriate metrics and getting good customer insight are the major challenges according the the survey.

I fully support the argument in the article that innovative companies build innovation cultures. This is a time-consuming change activity that needs full support from top-management in order to be successful. I just wrote an article about this issue for an innovation magazine in Austria that I also release on this blog, as soon as it is published.

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