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

by Anne Marie Knott

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781259860935
Publisher:	McGraw Hill LLC
Publication date:	03/13/2017
Edition description:	Student
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Anne Marie Knott is Professor of Strategy at Washington University, where her principle area of research is innovation. Her work has been published in Harvard Business Review, Management Science, Organization Science, and Strategic Management Journal, among others. Prior to receiving her PhD from UCLA, Professor Knott was a project engineer and program manager at Hughes Aircraft Company, developing missile guidance systems.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

Acknowledgments xi

1 The Problem: Flying Blind 1

2 Misconception 1: Small Companies Are More innovative 23

3 Misconception 2: Uncontested Markets Are Good for Innovation 45

4 Misconception 3: Spending More on R&D Increases Innovation 63

5 Misconception 4: Companies Need More Radical Innovation 89

6 Misconception 5: Open Innovation d Turbocharges R&D 109

7 Misconception 6: R&D Needs to Be More Relevant 127

8 Misconception 7: Wall Street Rewards Innovation 141

9 The Promise of RQ: Restoring Growth 161

10 Behind RQ: What It Really Is and How to Find Yours 183

Appendix 205

Notes 237

Index 245