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

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 percent 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 US 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 seven misconceptions about innovation trends - and how to avoid the ones that don't work
How investors can achieve nine times 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 sabermetrics did for baseball. It'll show you how innovation really works - with measurable results you can count on.