Strategy and Global Innovation 1000 2010 How Top Innovators Keep Winning

ISSUE 61WINTER 2010

strategy +business

THE GLOBAL INNOVATION 1000

How the Top Innovators Keep Winning

Booz &Company’s annual study of the world’s biggest

R&D spenders shows why highly innovative companies are able to consistently outperform.Their secret?They’re good at the right things,not at everything.

BY BARRY JARUZELSKI AND KEVIN DEHOFF

1000,our sixth,analyzes the capabilities systems that the most successful innovators have assembled to execute their distinct innovation strategies,and the ways they have aligned those capabilities with their overall business strategies.Innovators that have achieved this state of coherence,we have found,consistently and significantly outperform their rivals on several financial measures.We believe that this assessment of key innovation capabilities comes at a particularly opportune time.This year,for the first time in the more than a decade we have been tracking global R&D spending,total corporate R&D spending among the Global Innovation 1000de-clined,from US$521billion in 2008to $503billion in 2009,or 3.5percent.(See “Profiling the 2009Global Innovation 1000,”page 7.)Clearly,the global recession,which had not yet taken its toll on the world of I l l u s t r a t i o n b y O t t o S t e i n i n g e r

Why are some companies able to consistently conceive of,create,and bring to market innovative and profitable new products and services while so many oth-ers struggle?It isn’t the amount of money they spend on research and development.After all,our annual Global Innovation 1000study has shown time and again that there is no statistically significant relationship between financial performance and innovation spending,in terms of either total R&D dollars or R&D as a percent-age of revenues.What matters instead is the particular combination of talent,knowledge,team structures,tools,and process-es —the capabilities —that successful companies put together to enable their innovation efforts,and thus cre-ate products and services they can successfully take to market.This year’s edition of the Global Innovation THE GLOBAL INNOVATION 1000

HOW THE TOP INNOVATORS KEEPWINNING by Barry Jaruzelski and Kevin Dehoff

Booz &Company’s annual study of the world’s

biggest R&D spenders shows why highly

innovative companies are able to consistently

outperform.Their secret?They’re good at

the right things,not at everything.

features the global innovation 1000 2

s t r a t e g y +b u s i n e s s i s s u e 61

innovation in 2008,finally came home to roost last year.

Yet that decline makes it even more imperative that

companies spend their available R&D dollars wisely.

Our goal this year is to examine the capabilities needed

to maximize the impact of a company’s innovation

efforts in good times and bad,and to highlight the ben-

efits both of focusing on the short list of capabilities that

generate differential advantage,and of clearly linking the

specific decisions within innovation to the company’s

overall capabilities system and strategy.

Strategies and Capabilities

Three years ago,in 2007,we focused our annual inno-

vation study on how companies use distinct innovation

strategies to create their products and take them to mar-

ket.Nearly every company,we found,followed one of

three fundamental innovation strategies:

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 com-

petitors 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 in-

vestment in research and development to drive both

breakthrough innovation and incremental change,often

seeking to solve the unarticulated needs of their cus-

tomers via new technology.

It is important to note that we found that none of

these three strategies were any better than the others at producing sustained superior financial results,although Barry Jaruzelski barry.jaruzelski@https://www.wendangku.net/doc/9210412432.html, is a partner with Booz &Company in Florham Park,N.J.,and is the global leader of the firm’s innovation prac-tice.He has spent more than 20years working with high-tech and industrial clients on corporate and product strat-egy,product development effi-ciency and effectiveness,and the transformation of core innovation processes.Kevin Dehoff

kevin.dehoff@https://www.wendangku.net/doc/9210412432.html,

is a partner with Booz &

Company in Florham Park,

N.J.,and is the global leader

of the firm’s engineered prod-

ucts and services business.He

has spent nearly 20years

helping clients drive growth

and improve innovation perfor-

mance in areas including

research and development,

technology management,

product planning,and new

product development.

Also contributing to this article were s +b contributing editor Edward H.Baker and Booz &Company Principal Lisa Mitchell.of course individual companies outperform others with-in each strategic group.The success of each of the strate-gies depends on how closely companies,in pursuing innovation,align their innovation strategy with their business strategy and how much effort they devote to directly understanding the needs of end-users.This year we set out to answer two new questions:Which sets of capabilities are the most critical for the success of each of the three strategies?And do companies that focus on those critical capabilities see improved overall financial results?Our hypothesis:Companies that can craft a tightly focused set of innovation capa-bilities in line with their particular innovation strategy —and then align them with other enterprise-wide capa-bilities and their overall business strategy —will get a better return on the resources they invest in innovation.Innovation capabilities enable companies to per-form specific functions at all the stages of the R&D value chain —ideation,project selection,product de-velopment,and commercialization.We asked respon-dents to this year’s Global Innovation 1000survey to identify which capabilities were most important in achieving success at innovation.(See Exhibit 1.)Then,in hopes of getting further insight into which capabili-ties companies ought to work toward,we looked at the capabilities focused on by the top 25percent of per-formers within the group using each of the three inno-vation strategies.(See Exhibit 2.)No matter which of the three innovation strategies they pursued,all the successful companies depended on a common set of critical innovation capabilities.These include the ability to gain insights into customer needs and to understand the potential relevance of emerging technologies at the ideation stage,to engage actively

with customers to prove the validity of concepts during product development,and to work with pilot users to roll out products carefully during commercialization.

In addition to these common capabilities,compa-nies among the top25percent in performance within each strategic group depend on a set of distinct capabil-ities they feel are critical to achieve success,some of which overlap with those of other strategies.The most successful companies,we found,are those that focus on a particular,narrow set of common and distinct capabilities that enable them to better execute their cho-sen strategy.

Need Seekers

The distinct strategy of Need Seekers is to ascertain the needs and desires of consumers and then to develop products that address those needs and get them to mar-ket before the competition does.The capabilities re-quired for success begin at the ideation stage,where Need Seekers pursue open innovation and directly gen-erated,deep consumer and customer insights and ana-lytics,as well as a detailed understanding of emerging technologies and trends,in order to identify both their customers’needs and the technology trends that can help them meet those needs.

An example is Stanley Black&Decker Inc.’s DeWalt division,a maker of power tools for profession-al contractors.In its efforts to connect directly with cus-tomers even before it starts selecting which projects to develop,DeWalt regularly sends people out to construc-tion sites to research builders’needs and observe con-struction crews in action.One notable result of such efforts was the development of a12-inch miter saw, which became one of the company’s bestsellers,after researchers watched carpenters struggle to cut large pieces of molding on the industry-standard10-inch saw.

Exhibit1:The Most Important Innovation Capabilities

Innovation executives surveyed this year were asked to rank the capabilities they considered most important for innovation success on a scale of 1 to 5 (least to most important). At each of the four stages of the innovation process, a few critical capabilities emerged — from the ability to gain customer insight and analytics at the ideation stage to expertise in pilot-user selection and controlled rollouts at the commercialization stage.

Source: Booz&Company

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Need Seekers generally continue to remain con-nected to customers both during the project selection process,in which ongoing assessment of market poten-tial is a key capability,and during product development,when it is critical for Need Seekers to engage with cus-tomers to prove the real-world feasibility of their prod-ucts.At DeWalt,for instance,once prototypes of new products have been completed,engineers and marketers take them back to the same job sites where the research was originally done.They leave the new tools with the customers,and come back a week or so later to collect information on how the tools performed.That informa-tion feeds directly into the company’s iterative develop-ment process.Given that Need Seekers frequently depend for their success on developing technically innovative prod-ucts,a further key capability at the project selection stage involves technology risk assessment and manage-

ment.At the Xerox Corporation,for example,Steve Hoover,vice president of R&D in charge of software development for the company’s products,notes the importance of risk management in assessing the poten-tial business value of any project under development.“How big an opportunity are you going after here?”he asks.“What will drive its value?Where are the biggest technical risks?What might cause the project to fail?You’re looking for correlations.Where there’s risk,you have to put in the extra work to ensure you capture the potential value.”

At the commercialization stage,Need Seekers value pilot-user programs and global product launches as cru-

cial for keeping in touch with customers even as they scale up their sales efforts to capture the maximum value of being first to market.Both DeWalt and dental equip-

Exhibit 2:Critical and Specific Capabilities by Strategy

The top-performing companies in each of the innovation strategies, whether they were classified as Need Seekers, Market Readers, or Technology Drivers, all agreed on a shared set of critical innovation capabilities, but for each of the three strategies, a distinct set of capabilities — such as resource-requirement management and supplier–partner engagement for Market Readers — ranked among the most critical.

Source: Booz &Company MARKET READERS

All Three

NEED SEEKERS TECHNOLOGY DRIVERS

Open innovation Market potential assessment

Resource-requirement

management

Rigorous decision making

Technical risk

assessment Product platform management

Engagement with customers Broad consumer and customer insights

General understanding of emerging

technologies

Pilot-user selection/

controlled rollouts

Product life-cycle

management

Detailed understanding of

emerging technologies

and trends

Enterprise-wide

launch Directly generated deep consumer/customer insights Supplier–partner

engagement

COMMERCIALIZATION IDEATION

PROJECT SELECTION

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

CATEGORY OF

CRITICAL CAPABILITY

ment maker Dentsply rigorously assess the percentage of sales coming from new products.For Xerox,which sells its products around the world,managing the launch phase is a critical and highly complex endeavor,designed to accommodate the long lead times,logistics,and train-ing needs involved in selling large and sophisticated machines in very diverse markets.

Market Readers

Market Readers,on the other hand,pursue their cus-tomers more cautiously,preferring to innovate incre-mentally and keeping a close eye on the innovations of competitors.Like Need Seekers,they must pay careful attention at the ideation stage to what customers are looking for in the products they choose—but in their case,the goal is to make sure they are delivering success-fully differentiated alternatives.Market Readers also seek to track the technology trends that can help them create that differentiation.

Tim Yerdon is director of innovation and design at Visteon,a global auto parts manufacturer.But his real focus,he says,is“to look at market trends and translate those trends and needs into new products and services.”That’s why taking accurate readings of the marketplace at both the ideation and the project selection stages is a key capability for Visteon.A case in point is the com-pany’s development of reconfigurable digital displays for cars.Until recently,not many in the auto industry antic-ipated that drivers would favor digital displays over tra-ditional instrument clusters.Yet consumers were clearly happy with the flat-screen TVs they were buying for their homes.Says Yerdon:“We did the market research, we put all these data points together,and we could see where the trends were going.”In late2009,Visteon suc-cessfully launched its first reconfigurable displays.

The success of the Market Readers strategy depends on managers making sure the right products hit the market at the right time.So the initial process of select-ing which projects to focus on is critical:Here,the key capabilities include forecasting—and planning for—project resource requirements,and rigorous decision making involving portfolio trade-offs.At the Parker Hannifin Corporation,a diversified manufacturer of in-dustrial equipment,this understanding led to the imple-mentation of a highly disciplined stage-gate process for green-lighting projects,embedded in every division in the company.Parker Hannifin treats its general man-agers and their staff as venture capitalists who are being asked to invest the company’s money in certain projects.The rigorous value screens that the company has devel-oped as part of this process have enabled management to filter out the good projects from the bad much more successfully than before.

For companies like Visteon,an equally critical capa-bility is engagement with customers to prove real-world feasibility throughout the product development stage. By working actively with automakers,says Visteon’s Yerdon,“we’re taking a substantial amount of risk out of the system.Rather than coming up with an idea,build-ing it,and then bringing it to a customer,only to find out they don’t want it,we’re much better off working together and more openly.”

In the next year or so,Asia will become Visteon’s largest market—a remarkable achievement for a com-pany that started out as a spin-off of the Ford Motor Company.As Visteon continues to expand from its longtime base in North America,its capabilities in read-ing different markets accurately and collaborating with original equipment manufacturers in each market will become even more essential,and thus having in-region engineering capabilities will become increasingly critical. Technology Drivers

T echnology Drivers begin with a different approach to ideation,using their technological prowess to develop products their customers may not know they need. That’s why the ideation stage is so critical for these com-panies.They must pursue open innovation processes that capture as many potential ideas as possible,all the while avoiding being hobbled by a“not invented here”attitude.They must also constantly scan markets for new technologies that might further their pursuit of new ideas.In addition,T echnology Drivers must ensure that their technical personnel have time to ideate:This is the rationale for Google’s well-known“70-20-10”rule, which directs engineers to spend70percent of their time on core business tasks and20percent on related projects,but allows them to spend10percent of their time pursuing their own ideas.

T echnology Drivers can take different approaches to the ideation stage.The German technology giant Siemens AG,for example,spends5percent of its over-all R&D budget on planning for the long term,which involves developing detailed technology road maps within individual business units,as well as longer-range scenarios of future technology trends at the corporate level.This dual process has generated perspectives that have enabled the company to expand its large health

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technologies business into new areas such as personal-ized healthcare.And Siemens works hard to track the payback from its centralized innovation office in the form of actual new products launched.The Masco Corporation,an $8billion building products company,is more freewheeling in its ideation;Masco seeks to be ready to leverage new technologies no matter where they can be found.A few years back,com-pany representatives noticed some interesting technol-ogy at a trade show —a wireless,battery-less switch,which they were sure would have applications in the home.“We vetted the technology,brainstormed specif-ic applications for the home,and developed a pilot,”recalls Thom Nealssohn,manager of innovation imple-mentation services at Masco.“Every time we showed it to someone,we learned a little bit more,and that gave us the fuel that we needed to go back and make it bet-ter.”Masco launched a new line of innovative program-mable lighting products based on the technology —Verve Living Systems —in 2009.

Masco has had many similar successes.“In many cases,it’s just a matter of sitting down and saying,‘Here’s the problem we want to solve,’”Nealssohn says.“What really differentiates us is our willingness to partner with customers,to try not only to understand what issues they’re struggling with today,but to anticipate issues that may arise as a result of what we see going on in the world around us.”That strategy,in turn,demands that T echnology Drivers like Masco also focus on rigorous decision making in R&D portfolio trade-offs at the proj-

ect selection stage,if they are to funnel their wide-ranging ideas into products that can succeed in the market.

Finally,because of the nature of their products, T echnology Drivers must pay strict attention to two key capabilities in the commercialization stage:pilot-user selection/controlled rollouts,and product life-cycle management.In essence,Masco serves three different sets of customers:large home builders,home improve-ment chains,and ultimately,end-users.Says Nealssohn:“We believe that everyone in the distribution chain has to win.A shift of margin from one partner in the chain to another does not necessarily equate to a win-ning product.So it doesn’t matter how much the cus-tomer wants the product—if the distributor or the home builder doesn’t see the opportunity to make

money,chances are that product is going to struggle or even fail.”

Focus Matters

The capabilities required to pursue each strategy form a systematic set of skills,processes,and tools that com-panies must focus on to succeed at each stage of the innovation process.In contrast to top-performing inno-vators such as Apple,Google,Xerox,Visteon,and Siemens,the poorest-performing companies within each strategic group—those among the bottom25percent —take a less-focused approach to the most critical innovation capabilities.

These lower-performing companies,regardless of which of the three strategies they are pursuing,cite only

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are three customer-and market-oriented capabilities that matter most:Gathering customer insights during the ideation stage,assessing market potential during the selection stage,and engaging with customers during the development stage.Yet when it comes to the capabilities needed to introduce their products into the market, there is no single one consistently named as a strength. Clearly,there is a substantial gap between most compa-nies’ability to create innovative new products and their ability to successfully take them to market.

In commercialization,the top performers stand out by executing well in two critical areas:global product launches and pilot-user selection and rollout.This should come as no surprise,given that commercializa-tion capabilities are by nature the most cross-functional, and are tied tightly to several other capabilities compa-nies need to succeed in the marketplace,including man-ufacturing,logistics,sales,and marketing.Xerox’s Hoover acknowledges just how important the company-wide process of launching products in the marketplace is in the ability to capture the business value of innovation.“What do we have to get done,and when,so that we can feed the new product into the global operating com-panies’pipeline,and what do they have to have ready so

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they can push it out?It’s really basic project manage-ment,but it has to be executed really well.”Aligning with Corporate Strategy Companies that focus on a consistent set of innovation capabilities clearly outperform their rivals.But as the issue of commercialization demonstrates,a consistent set of innovation capabilities can’t by itself explain why they outperform.Innovation —and the particular strategies companies employ to pursue innovation —is just one aspect of every company’s efforts to succeed in the marketplace.They must also excel in areas outside R&D,including manufacturing,logistics,sales,market-ing,and human resources.And their innovation efforts must be in sync with their overall corporate strategy:They must integrate the right innovation capabilities with the right set of firm-wide capabilities,as deter-mined by their overall strategy.

Why is strategic alignment so critical?As part of

corporate strategy,every company needs to ask itself

what business it is really in,and how it intends to win —and then ask the individual business units the same question.This must be both a bottom-up and a top-down process.On the one hand,the business units,which are so much closer to the customer,must first see an opportunity,and begin to innovate.On the other hand,corporate strategists must manage the company-wide R&D and sales agenda necessary to compete suc-cessfully,even as they work to minimize spending and make the process as efficient as possible.As we demon-strated in 2007,companies that achieve a tight align-ment of their firm-wide and innovation strategies on average generate 40percent higher operating income growth and 100percent greater total shareholder return.Exhibit 10:Innovators’ Performance on Critical Capabilities

Respondents were asked to rate their companies’ performance on critical capabilities on a scale of 1 to 5. At the ideation, project selection, and product development stages of the innovation process, companies gave themselves generally good marks. The survey, however, revealed a general shortcoming at the commercialization stage, where companies agreed that their efforts were falling short.

Source: Booz & Company

s t r a t e g y +b u s i n e s s i s s u e 61

The Coherent Innovator Companies that develop the relatively cohesive set of innovation capabilities we have outlined,and then com-bine them with similarly distinctive firm-wide capabili-ties —thus aligning their innovation strategy with the overall corporate strategy —can be said to be coherent.They gain what we call a “coherence premium,”which is manifested in their ability to outperform their rivals.By comparing the financial results of highly coherent companies in the Global Innovation 1000to their less-

coherent rivals,we found that,when normalized,the profit margins of companies ranked in the top third in terms of coherence were 22percent higher,on average,than those of companies in the bottom two-thirds,and that the coherent companies achieved 18percent greater market capitalization growth as well.(See Exhibit 13.)In general,the more coherent a company is,the more competitive success it will have —and the more it will be able to generate the higher margins that result from being truly differentiated.Why are strong margins associated with higher

coherence?Optimizing the proper set of capabilities

allows companies to focus on what matters most,and not spread effort and resources across a wide range of capabilities that are less critical.More specifically,com-panies that focus on critical capabilities aligned with overall strategy tend to innovate more effectively and bring their innovations to market more efficiently,boosting top-line growth while reducing relative costs.Regarding market cap growth,as companies gain the differentiating capabilities that give them coherence,

their built-in advantage enables them to improve earn-ings growth,a key metric that the stock market takes into account when pricing a company’s shares.

Industry Highest Possible

Score: 100

Lowest Possible Score: 0

Market Capitalization 5-yr . CAGR EBITDA as

%of Revenue

5-yr. AVG.

Exhibit 13:The Coherent Innovator’s Premium Companies on the Global Innovation 1000 list that scored in the top third in terms of overall coherence — those that had focused on a narrow set

of innovation capabilities, and aligned them with their innovation and

corporate strategy — outperformed their less-coherent industry peers. Source: Booz & Company

Booz &Company identified the 1,000pub-lic companies around the world that spent the most on research and development in 2009.To be included,a company’s data on its R&D spending had to be public;all data is based on each company’s most recent fiscal year,as of June 30,2010.Subsidiaries more than 50percent owned by a single corporate parent were exclud-ed because their financial results are included in the parent company’s report-ing.This is the same core approach we have used in the previous five years of the study.For each of the top 1,000companies,we obtained key financial metrics for 2002through 2009,including sales,gross profit,operating profit,net profit,R&D expenditures,and market capitalization.All foreign currency sales and R&D expenditure figures through 2009were translated into U.S.dollars at 2009daily average exchange rates.In addition,total shareholder return was gathered and adjusted for each company’s correspon-ding local market.Each company was coded into one of nine industry sectors (or “other”)accord-ing to Bloomberg’s standard industry des-ignations,and into one of five regional designations as determined by each com-pany’s reported headquarters location.To enable meaningful comparisons across industries,we indexed the R&D spending levels and financial performance metrics of each company against its industry group’s median values.This year,to better understand the relationship between innovation strategy and capabilities,we also conducted a Web-based survey of more than 450sen-ior managers and R&D professionals from more than 400different companies around the globe.The companies partici-pating represented more than US$150bil-lion in R&D spending,or 40percent of the total Global Innovation 1000R&D spend-ing for 2009.Respondents came from all industry sectors;52percent came from North America,33percent from Europe,

and 15percent from the rest of the world.We asked respondents to evaluate the innovation capabilities they believed were most important across the value chain,as well as their performance in each of these capabilities.Responses were ana-lyzed with a variety of statistical methods to allow us to distinguish the capabilities most important in pursuing each of the three innovation strategies we defined in our 2007study.Although company names and responses were kept confidential (unless permission to use them was explicitly given),a large number of the respondents identified themselves,en-abling us to associate their survey an-swers with their company’s performance.Financial performance was normalized by industry to compare the impact of capa-bility coherence on corporate financial performance both within strategies and across all companies.

Booz &Company Global Innovation 1000:Methodology

Apple is the classic example:In the early1990s,the company squandered enormous resources and billions of dollars on a series of failed products like printers, scanners,and the Newton PDA.Its efforts to do every-thing itself,building capabilities as varied as cutting-edge hardware development and volume manufactur-ing,led to huge losses and massive layoffs.But once Steve Jobs returned as chairman and CEO in1997, Apple began to focus its portfolio and its capabilities. The company has since concentrated very selectively on what it does well,and what really differentiates it from its peers:deep understanding of end-users,a high-touch consumer experience,intuitive user interfaces,sleek product design,and iconic branding.For example, Apple narrowed its product line and began leveraging the Apple brand through its Apple Store retail strategy.

The results speak for themselves.Apple’s profitabil-ity and market cap are well above the industry average, and this year our survey respondents voted it far and away the most innovative company—all of which it achieved while consistently spending far less on R&D as a percentage of sales than the median company in the computing and electronics sector.(See“The10Most Innovative Companies,”page12.)

Innovators and Strategists

The virtue of thinking about innovation in terms of capabilities and the capabilities systems that enable com-panies to be coherent is that it provides a specific way of talking about what companies need to focus on to trans-late their innovation efforts into sustained success.The job of innovation leaders—and of corporate strategists —isn’t only to choose which capabilities to pursue.It’s just as often to decide which ones don’t matter as much in achieving superior performance.As Xerox’s Steve Hoover puts it,“If a certain competency has nothing to do with how you’re positioning yourself in your market and creating value for your customers,then don’t over-supply it.Put your energy elsewhere,where you are going to differentiate.”

Companies,by focusing on the capabilities they believe are critical differentiating factors in their efforts to conceive of,develop,and sell their product in their

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