Booz & Company’ s annual study of R&D spending reveals the tools that are transforming innovation’”from customer insight to product launch. The study focuses on the digital enablers of the innovation process’”how the most successful companies are, and aren’ t, using digital tools and processes to improve speed, decrease cost, enhance quality, reduce complexity, and sharpen insight into customer and market needs to improve their innovation efforts.
These new digital tools are fostering change, but not in isolation; they are joining another group that has been around for years and is already well established at most companies. Productivity enablers such as computer-aided design (CAD) software used in the design and tooling stages of product development and project management tools that help track time lines, workflows, milestones, and spending have a long track record of helping companies boost the efficiency of their innovation processes’”particularly at the back end when they are developing products.
The result? Digital tools are influencing every stage of the innovation life cycle: from collecting and analyzing customer insights, to generating and vetting ideas, to designing and manufacturing new products, and, finally, to tracking products’ success once launched. Companies have a real opportunity’”perhaps even an imperative’”to rethink their digital tool kit. Indeed, we are seeing the first signs of a digital revolution that will transform how innovation is done. As with all revolutions, both breakthroughs and dead ends will make an appearance along the way. And there can be a tendency to get caught up in the hype. But make no mistake’”digitization will change innovation, and companies should act now to avoid being left behind.
The 2013 study, which are available on strategy-business.com and booz.com, also includes:
- The Digital Tool Landscape: An interactive graphic about the tools that are transforming innovation.
- Video interviews with the study’ s authors: Barry Jaruzelski, John Loehr, and Richard Holman discuss the results of Booz & Company’ s 2013 Global Innovation 1000 Study.
- Infographic: Top 20 R&D Spenders 2005–2013: An interactive look at the 20 publicly traded companies worldwide that spent the most on R&D over the past nine years.
- Infographic: Comparison of R&D Spending by Regions and Industries: An interactive graphic comparing region and industry R&D spending by all Global Innovation 1000 companies over the past nine years.