好创意不是想买就能买

    企业能否变成更好的创新者？目前，成熟经济体的经济增长陷入停滞，发展中国家的经济增长放缓，很多专家对国内外创新的数量和质量感到忧心忡忡。值此之际，上述问题已经变成了一个价值数百万美元的问题。

    过去八年里，我们的博斯管理咨询公司（Booz & Company）每年都对创新投入力度最大的1,000家上市公司进行研发支出调查。每年我们都发现，企业研发支出的多少与总体业绩表现无关。例如，苹果（Apple）在我们的调查中总是成为最具创新力的公司，但其研发支出只占到营收的2.2%，大大低于整个计算机和电子行业的6.5%。

    这1,000家公司的研发支出在2011年总共达到了6,030亿美元，同比增加了9.6%。但其中很多钱并没有用在刀刃上。作为今年调查的一部分，我们调查、采访了企业高管他们在创新早期阶段的活动情况。在这个阶段，企业产生、然后审查创意。这些创意最终将变成新的产品和服务。但调查结果并不令人满意。

    接受我们调查的企业高管中，46%的人承认，他们构思新创意并将之投入产品研发阶段的努力没有取得很好的效果。只有四分之一的人说，他们的公司既善于构思创意，同时也善于研发。由于这些公司采取的新产品研发和上市策略不同，调查结果也存在很大差别。

    如果企业与客户直接交流，了解他们的需求，然后率先向市场推出新产品，这种早期创新的努力往往更有效。

    如果企业依靠对已选定市场的深刻了解来开展渐进性创新，但由此诞生的产品并不是市场先入者，他们在构思和审查新创意方面的效果就会更差。看重技术解决方案、需要颠覆性技术的公司也是如此。

    但这些区别并不重要。真正重要的是企业在执行已选定策略方面的表现如何（前提是的确存在创新策略，事实是，近20%的企业都没有）。企业必须首先把创新和公司整体战略结合起来，然后确保自己有能力执行这个策略，并保证公司的文化和结构与之相适应。

    举个例子，惠普（Hewlett-Packard）的成功长期以来都是由其技术创新推动。如果惠普决定从大规模的PC消费者需求调查中寻找创新线索，它就不会那么成功。“消费者其实并不知道什么是有可能的，”惠普企业战略和联盟高级副总裁吉里希•奈尔说。“他们能说出自己的需求，但他们不知道技术能做到什么程度，尤其是因为技术的能力变化很快。必须把它创造出来……。”

    Can companies learn to become better innovators? At a time when economic growth is stagnating in mature economies and slowing in developing ones, and experts far and wide are fretting over the degree and quality of innovation here and abroad, this has turned into a (multi) million-dollar question.

    For the past eight years, our firm, Booz & Company, has conducted an annual study on R&D spending among the 1,000 public companies that spend the most on innovation. Every year, we affirm that there is no correlation between how much a company spends on R&D and its overall financial performance. Apple (AAPL), for instance, has consistently been named the most innovative company in our study, yet it spends just 2.2% of its revenue on R&D, well below the 6.5% of revenue spent by the computing and electronics industry as a whole.

    Overall spending among all 1,000 companies increased by 9.6% in 2011 compared to the previous year, to $603 billion. But a great deal of that money is not being spent wisely. As part of this year's study, we surveyed and interviewed executives about their activities during the early stages of innovation, when companies generate and then vet the ideas that will eventually become new products and services. The results were not encouraging.

    Forty-six percent of the executives we surveyed admitted that their efforts to generate good new ideas and move them into product development stage were only marginally effective, and just a quarter of them said their companies were good at both idea generation and development. These results vary considerably based on the strategy that these companies follow in developing new products and taking them to market.

    Companies that directly engage customers in hopes of understanding their needs and wants, and then try to be first to market with their new products, tend to be more effective in their early-stage innovation efforts.

    Companies that depend on a deep understanding of their chosen markets and prefer to innovate through incremental improvement, even if they aren't first to market with the resulting products, are somewhat less effective at generating and vetting new ideas. Also less effective are companies that emphasize technology solutions and need a robust pipeline of game-changing technology.

    But even these distinctions don't matter as much as how well a company can execute on its chosen strategy (assuming that it actually has a strategy for innovation; nearly 20% of companies don't). A company must first strive to get its innovation and overall business strategies on the same page. Then it must make sure it has the agility to carry out this strategy, and make sure its culture and organization are on board.

    Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), for example, whose success has long been driven by its technological wizardry, would likely be much less successful if it decided to take its innovation cues primarily from extensive market research into what PC consumers want. "Consumers don't really know what is possible," says Girish Nair, HP's senior vice president of corporate strategy and alliances. "They can describe what they want, but they don't know what the technology can do, especially because what the technology can do changes rapidly. You have to create it…."