Strategy + Business - "Money Isn't Everything" - 12/5/05 - So it turns out that Booz Allen Hamilton have released the results of a survey of what they call their "Global Innovation 1000" - in this case, the list is comprised of the top 1000 publicly held companies that spent the most on R&D in 2004. Ignore for a minute if you will, the ridiculous notion that all R&D spending is hardly a good measure of a company's ability to innovate - not least of which because innovation is FAR more than R&D - and there are some relatively interesting results here - some good - and some just funny...

The major (good) findings were:

1) It's the process, not the pocketbook - The survey showed that success was a function of the quality of the organization's process for innovation rather than the amount of money it actually spent pursuing individual projects.

2) Collaboration is Key - Enabling cross cultural and organizational groups to work together to, for example, commercialise a product is a crucial element of success

And the funny?....

1) Money doesn't buy results - Rather amusingly, their very first result is that there is absolutely "no relationship between R&D Spending and the primary measures of economic or corporate success, such as growth, enterprise profitability, and shareholder return." - In other words, they're either suggesting that, as far as they're concerned, innovation doesn't contribute to success, or it's an admission that maybe they just picked the wrong 1000 companies...

2) Size matters - Apparently being bigger helps....Why?...because if you're bigger (and make more money) - you can spend the same amount of money as a smaller company and it only represents a smaller proportion of your overall revenue! Duh....Why didn't we think of that?...

The report actually then goes onto a far more detailed version of the findings which actually has some interesting nuggets in it too - but only of use for those of you really looking at Product Development in depth.