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In their strategy+business emag this time, Booz, Allen, Hamil­ton has a report: “Smart Spenders: The Global Inno­va­tion 1000.” Osten­si­bly this is a report on why some com­pa­nies (about 10% in the study) get expo­nen­tially bet­ter returns on lower lev­els of R&D invest­ment. Strategy+business is usu­ally a pretty good source of insight so admit­tedly my hopes were high.

There are some inter­est­ing facts in the piece. The top 1000 R&D spenders account for some 85% of R&D spend­ing as a whole. The authors point to the fact that there is vir­tu­ally no cor­re­la­tion between per­for­mance and R&D bud­gets (the only one being gross mar­gin – yet the finan­cial value of this is sel­dom cap­tured). Many com­pa­nies waste too much time rein­vent­ing the wheel and see ideas get mired down in organ­i­sa­tional quick­sand. And many sim­ply don’t under­stand what their cus­tomers want or how to com­mu­ni­cate with them.

All inter­est­ing stuff. But how about infor­ma­tion that com­pa­nies can use to do some­thing about it?

The rec­om­men­da­tions appear to boil down to:

• Get good at all parts of inno­va­tion ‘value chain’
• Go for flat structures
• Think about cus­tomer needs
• Be quick

Beyond that… well… every­one does it dif­fer­ently really.

This has the feel of a sce­nario where some very expen­sive research has been com­mis­sioned, but which hasn’t answered the key ques­tions. So you get lots of infor­ma­tion but pre­cious lit­tle insight beyond a kind of inno­va­tion 101.

I would want to know about the cor­po­rate cul­tures that breed inno­va­tion. I’d want to know who they recruit, how they get the right mix of peo­ple and how they incen­tivise them (out­side of offer­ing loads of cash). And I’d want to know about how these com­pa­nies move beyond what their cus­tomers say they want now to cre­at­ing break­through prod­ucts they will want in future. The report doesn’t answer any of these.

Shame.

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