The Global Innovation 1000: How the top Innovators Keep Winning

Why are some companies able to consistently conceive of, create, and bring to market innovative and profitable new products and services while so many others
struggle?

In an exhaustive new study under its annual The Global Innovation 1000, global strategy consulting firm Booz & Company says, it isn't the amount of money they spend on research and development and that there is no statistically significant relationship between financial performance and innovation spending, in terms of either total R&D dollars or R&D as a percentage of revenues.

What matters instead is the particular combination of talent, knowledge, teamstructures, tools, and processes - the capabilities - that successful companies put together to enable their innovation efforts, and thus create products and services they can successfully take to market.

Booz & Co says this year's edition of the Global Innovation 1000: How the top Innovators  Keep Winning, analyses the capabilities systems that the most successful innovators have assembled to execute their distinct innovation strategies, and the ways they have aligned those capabilities with their overall business strategies.

"Innovators that have achieved this state of coherence, we have found, consistently and significantly outperform their rivals on several financial measures."

Interstingly the study reveals that this year, for the first time in the more than a decade total corporate R&D spending among the Global Innovation 1000 declined, from $521 billion in 2008 to $503 billion in 2009, or 3.5 per cent, as the global recession deepened.