Move your innovation from moments of genius to repeatable process.
Welcome to our first blog!
People have long struggled to improve innovation. How do we innovate faster? Better? More repeatably? Part of the difficulty is that innovation growth is often confounded with Research & Development (R&D) spending. In 2008 the companies with the highest spending were health care or automotive related; three of the top six were Toyota ($8.4 B), GM ($8.1 B), and Ford ($7.5 B). By 2020 the top six were all digitech (software, internet, computing, electronics), with Amazon topping the list at $42.7 B. In fact the list changes somewhat dramatically over time. In the automotive sector, by late 2008 there was a U.S. government bailout, with only Ford indicating they could survive without it. In health care, we can look at the internal rate of return (IRR) of the pharmaceutical industry from 1995 to 2020 (Figure). The Pharma IRR has been falling in a linear manner, and probably would have gone right through zero if it weren’t for the Covid-19 vaccine in 2019-2022. What’s going on here? There seems to be a disconnect between R&D spending and innovation growth. In 1988 Steve Jobs famously said, “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.”
The purpose of this blog and of the Knowlecular Processes Company is to increase your innovation speed, value, and repeatability, by providing a coherent system-level framework for innovation as a process, along with actionable tools and algorithms you can use now to help. That is what this blog will be about.
