Innovation: It's Payback Time!
Lester Craft of Innovate Forum suggests that an innovation book (Payback: Reaping the Rewards of Innovation) co-authored by two consultants at Boston Consulting Group could become the most important book about innovation in 2007:
"Here’s a prediction: One of the biggest business books of 2007 will feature innovation. That book, more than likely, will be the newly published Payback: Reaping the Rewards of Innovation, by James P. Andrew and Harold L. Sirkin. Why? A couple of reasons: First, Payback is being marketed aggressively, which indicates that the publisher, Harvard Business School Press, thinks it’s worth investing in. But more important is that the book addresses one of the most troubling aspects of innovation: failure, at so many companies, to achieve an acceptable return from innovation spending.
Payback is at the cutting edge of this problem. Its authors are senior vice presidents at The Boston Consulting Group, which, not coincidentally, has been producing some of the most important research available on the business of innovation and R&D."
Anyway, it looks like a lot of big-time executives are endorsing the book, including the chairman & CEO of SAP, the vice-chairman and CEO of Samsung Electronics, the VP of Corporate Strategy at Nokia, and the former CIO of P&G. (Let's just hope that the book is better than the 1999 Mel Gibson movie of the same name.)