How Innovation Really Works: Using the Trillion-Dollar R&D Fix to Drive Growth

Book excerpt: Are you spending too much on R&D? Too little? Is your innovation program successful? And how do you measure that success? Your company is spending millions on R&D every year, but despite your best efforts, that R&D isn’t driving growth. If you’re like 95% of firms, you aren’t investing the right amount, and the productivity of your R&D has fallen dramatically over the past several years. That’s because there hasn’t been a universal, uniform, and reliable measure of R&D—until now. First introduced in Anne Marie Knott’s influential Harvard Business Review article, RQTM (Research Quotient) is a revolutionary new tool that measures a company’s R&D capability—its ability to convert investment in R&D into products and services people want to buy or to reduce the cost of producing these. RQ not only tells companies how “smart” they are, it provides a guide for how much they should invest in R&D to ensure that investment will increase revenues, profits, and market value. Armed with insights from her experience as an R&D project manager, 20 years of academic research, and two National Science Foundation grants, Knott devised RQ and used the measure to test common innovation prescriptions across the full spectrum of U.S. companies engaged in R&D. The results are nothing short of game-changing. In this essential guide, you will learn: • how to use RQ to determine which R&D investments are most likely to drive growth—using the hard data you already have to better utilize the innovation tools you’re already using • the 7 misconceptions about innovation trends—and how to avoid the ones that don’t work • how investors can achieve 9x returns in the market and help companies in the process • why corporate—and GDP—growth has stalled and how to restore it without R&D tax credits This book promises to do for innovation and R&D what TQM did for manufacturing and what Sabremetrics did for baseball. It’ll show you How Innovation Really Works—with measurable results you can count on.