How do companies innovate successfully?

They can spend the most money, hire the best engineers, develop the best technology, and conduct the best market research. But unless their research and development efforts are driven by a thorough understanding of what their customers want, their performance may well fall short — at least compared to that of their more customer- driven competitors. John Schiech, president of the DeWalt division of Black & Decker (the division that makes power tools used by professional contractors), put it simply. When asked what made his com - pany so successful, he responded, “It’s engineers and marketing product managers spending hours and hours on job sites talking to the guys who are trying to make their living with these tools.”

This insight represents a further amplification of our ongoing research into the costs and value of corporate innovation. In 2006, as in the two previous years of our annual study of the Booz Allen Hamilton Global Innovation 1000 — the 1,000 publicly held companies around the world that spent the most on research and development — overall corporate revenues among these companies increased 10 percent. Once again, their overall spending on research and development also rose, to US$447 billion this year. And as in years past, we found no statistically significant connection between the amount of money a company spent on innovation and its financial performance. This document presents only a summary of the available research. Download this Booz Allan Hamilton report...

While broad-based ad networks have taken center stage as the darlings of the media industry, vertical b-to-b networks are slowly gaining traction with marketers that want to reach more targeted audiences.

In the last six months, there has been a frenzy of deals in the consumer ad network space, including Google's acquisition of DoubleClick in April for $3.1 billion, WPP Group's purchase of 24/7 Real Media in May for $649 million and AOL's acquisition of Tacoda in July for a reported $275 million.

But behind the scenes, smaller advances have been made by targeted b-to-b networks looking to reach industry-specific segments. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

If you are looking to grow your channel revenue, then you probably agree that it has become
extremely difficult to differentiate yourself from the competition. Especially when your
competition, like you, communicates to partners or solution providers (VARs, integrators,
consultants, etc.) that their products provide the most advanced technology, the highest reliability
and the overall best quality and value in the marketplace. If you are only using your products to
differentiate, then you’re going at it the hard way. Download this document…