An essential guide to determining which R&D investments are most likely to drive growth, increase profits, and produce innovative products Your company is spending millions on R&D every year, but despite your best efforts, that R&D isn’t driving growth. There’s a reason for that. If you’re like 95% of firms, you aren’t investing right amount, and the productivity of your R&D has fallen dramatically over the past several years.How is this possible?  You read all the innovation articles, and hire the top consultants.  The problem is no one (including the authors and consultants) know if their prescriptions are valid, because there aren’t good measures of R&D to test them.  Using a new measure, called Research Quotient (RQ), professor Anne Marie Knott tests many of the most popular innovation prescriptions using proprietary data from National Science Foundation (NSF) surveys of company R&D practices.  The results are startling.  Many of the most popular prescriptions don’t work.  Not only do they fail to improve innovation, in many cases they actually make firms worse!  Thus the popular prescriptions are actually contributing to the decline in firm innovativeness. RQ changes that by offering a “Sabremetrics for R&D”. Just as Sabremetrics improved the productivity of baseball teams, the hope for RQ is it will reverse the decline in companies’ R&D productivity.  How Innovation Really Works will show you how.  It provides actionable information to increase companies’ market value in the short run through wiser R&D investment and to increase it over the long run through better R&D practices.   While this prospect should be promising to managers and shareholders, it has even broader implications.  Because R&D productivity drives economic growth, reversing the decline in firm innovativeness has the potential to restore economic growth as well.
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Introduces new methods to measure a company’s Research Quotient (RQ) and determine which R&D investments are most likely to increase profits, and drive growth and innovation.
PrefaceAcknowledgmentsChapter 1: The Problem: Flying BlindChapter 2: Misconception 1: Small Companies Are More InnovativeChapter 3: Misconception 2: Uncontested Markets Are Good for InnovationChapter 4: Misconception 3: Spending More on R&D Increases Innovation Chapter 5: Misconception 4: Companies Need More Radical InnovationChapter 6: Misconception 5: Open Innovation Turbocharges R&DChapter 7: Misconception 6: R&D Needs to Be More RelevantChapter 8: Misconception 7: Wall Street Rewards InnovationChapter 9: The Promise of RQ: Restoring GrowthChapter 10: Behind RQ: What It Really Is and How to Find YoursAppendixNotesIndex
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“Every corporate leader gives lip service to the need for innovation as the engine of organic growth, but how many actually measure the productivity of their innovation strategies and expenditures? In How Innovation Really Works, Anne Marie Knott provides a truly new and eminently practicable way of measuring and thinking about the productivity of R&D. For everyone who manages or thinks about management, Anne Marie Knott’s work is a living illustration of the clarity that flows from having good measures and benchmarks. If you want to see how your company measures up or learn how to improve your innovation batting average, get this brilliant book now.”—Richard Rumelt, the Harry and Elsa Kunin Chair at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and author of Good Strategy/Bad Strategy“This treasure chest of insight is a must-read for anyone interested in innovation—managers, investors, and researchers alike. Anne Marie’s Knott’s RQ measure of innovation effectiveness is an invaluable compass for navigating through the fog of R&D investment, returns, and organization.—Ron Adner, the David T. McLaughlin Chaired Professor at the Tuck School of Business of Dartmouth College and author of The Wide Lens“RQ is an invaluable tool for CTOs and those involved with leading and funding technology development and innovation. Knott provides astute insights and a quantitative tool to define and improve the productivity of innovation spending, as well as inform strategic discussions on optimizing investment at a company level, as well as how to best optimize among divisions.”—Bruce Brown, former CTO of Procter and Gamble“When it comes to innovation, many companies are like Alice in Wonderland—they don’t know where they want to go and so they can’t choose which road to follow. Knott provides a simple but powerful sign post that leaders can use both to evaluate their prior innovation decisions and to help make future innovation decisions more effectively.”—Jay Barney, Lassonde Chair of Social Entrepreneurship at the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah and author of What I Didn’t Learn in Business School“Anne Marie’s analysis challenges several myths and misconceptions on how innovation, growth, and profitability are mutually related. Her original and methodical approach, based on the introduction of an R&D investment variable in the classic production function, provides a very useful and practical tool for executive managers to set optimal R&D investment targets focusing on growth and ROI.”—Alessandro Piovaccari, CTO of Silicon Labs“Galileo Galilei, in describing the scientific method, said: `measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.’ Professor Knott’s research has made measurable and precise how companies can become more effective at research and development. This book provides a modern and comprehensive guide to innovation management and is a must-read for executives who care about improving their company’s performance through breakthrough products and services.”—Karim Lakhani, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and author of Revolutionizing Innovation“Anne Marie’s RQ work is generating a great deal of buzz in the field. She has created an original, convincing, and empirically validated measure that challenges many of the assumptions and conclusions of famous papers in management and economics. Armed with this measure, this book provides corporations with powerful advice about how to elevate R&D as the engine of value creation.”—Todd Zenger, the N. Eldon Tanner Chair in Strategy at the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah and author of Beyond Competitive Advantage “Just like people have an IQ, companies have an RQ: a Research Quotient. With her painstaking research and data, Anne Marie Knott shows how RQ powers innovation for companies and for regions and nations as a whole. If you want to understand how innovation really works, read this book.”—Richard Florida, Global Research Professor at New York University, University Professor at the University of Toronto, and author of The Rise of the Creative Class“Getting the innovation resource allocation decision right is critical to shareholder value creation, demanding metrics to measure productivity and performance. How Innovation Really Works is both a thorough review of existing R&D metrics and a description of a new approach that seeks to better show the value of R&D. This thought-provoking book is a valuable contribution to the field. I very much enjoyed reading it.”—A. N. Sreeram, CTO and SVP of The Dow Chemical Company“Billions of dollars are spent each year on R&D, with limited ability to measure the impact on the value it provides to help in proper allocation of limited resources and to optimize shareholder value. Drawing on past research and firsthand experience, as well as interviews with current practitioners in the area, How Innovation Really Works is a book that needed to be written.”—Robert W. Frick, former Vice Chairman and CFO of Bank of America“How Innovation Really Works is a refreshing and at times even controversial new look at innovation and return on investment (ROI) from the R&D activities of every major industrial enterprise. Knott uses solid scientific data to support her premise that ROI from innovation is not necessarily proportional to money spent on R&D. She clearly describes the complexity of the subject: how R&D is accounted for, how innovation impacts the outcome, and how that outcome is tied to revenues and timing. She even considers such factors as behavior and human talent. She proves that the most popular recommendations for ROI from innovation do not work and proposes a new and relatively simple measure: RQ (sort of corporate R&D IQ), somewhat of an equivalent to human IQ.”—Mietek Glinkowski, VP of Global Engineering NA at Schneider Electric“This is the best book on innovation I have read. I've read it twice.”—Steve Freilich, former Director of Materials Science at DuPont
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781259860935
Publisert
2017-04-16
Utgiver
Vendor
McGraw-Hill Education
Vekt
537 gr
Høyde
234 mm
Bredde
155 mm
Dybde
25 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
272

Forfatter

Biographical note

Dr. Anne Marie Knott is Professor of Strategy at Washington University, where her principle area of research is innovation. This interest stems from an earlier career as an R&D project manager at Hughes Aircraft. Her work has been published in Management Science, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Small Business Economics, and the Harvard Business Review. She is the author of Venture Design.