The Innovation Imperative

This is a relatively old article, but worth reading again:

The Innovation Imperative
By Darrel Rhea, Cheskin CEO
Originally published in The HUB Magazine, March 2006

Attempts by America’s major corporations to innovate new products almost always fail. Business Week’s estimates of single-digit innovation success rates confirm what innovation practitioners have known for years: What makes the cultures of our largest corporations so successful at squeezing profit from manufacturing and marketing products often makes them inept at inventing them.

This creates a painful dilemma for executives. On the one hand, they know that the market rewards organic growth obtained from internal innovation over growth generated through acquisitions. But because of a poor track record of corporate innovation initiatives, they also observe that resources spent on these activities usually offer management a very poor return on investment ... '