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we're meeting today with kim wagner who is a partner and managing director at the boston consulting group or vcg
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and kim is an expert in corporate innovation and she has been author of a of a recent study called managing the
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unmanageable radical innovation but her latest work just out is something called the most innovative
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companies of 2014. this is a study that you've done for a couple of years in a row now and
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it's a survey i believe maybe you can talk about briefly the methodology and
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then what some of the highlights of of the study are sure so this is our ninth time doing the survey
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we we do it roughly on an annual basis and what we do is we go out to about 1 500 individuals who are involved
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in corporate innovation they range from ceos down to engineers on the shop floor
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and we asked them about which companies they find are the most innovative why they think that they're innovative
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we combine that result with estimates of revenue and margin and success in general in the financial
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markets and that generates our list of the top 50 companies each year it varies a little bit from
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year to year one year last year actually we had a lot of automotive players on the list the year before we
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had a lot of industrial goods players on the list this year i would call it the return of
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the tech and the consumer companies to the list and so you know digital innovation and
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um innovation in the consumer electronics space has boosted those quite substantially on the list so it's
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not just the companies that came out with cool innovative products or very useful
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products it's companies that actually did well selling them revenues and profits
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flowing to the bottom line so it's a combination of those two right but realize we're polling
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essentially executives and so to some extent this is a peer it's a pure study so if executives
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believe other executives are innovative then they end up on the list what do you
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think they think about when they want to choose the most innovative companies what are what are their criteria how do
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they tend to think about it i'm sure it varies by industry a lot and that sort
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of thing but if you can generalize a little bit i'm sure it does and what's interesting
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is we actually ask them how innovative they think they are and and this year we added some extra
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questions around culture and around because innovative culture became a big theme
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this year as we talk to our clients as well as what it takes to do radical innovation
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and do they believe that they are breakthrough innovators or just incremental innovators and just using
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the results of what they believe and the way that they behave i would say that they're looking at
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the strength of the senior management focus on innovation the resolve to stand up and say i'm going to continue to
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invest in this even when other people say no the strength of their processes both
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around portfolio and new product development the strength of their ip management and
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the focus on the customer it's it's very much customer and consumer driven
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and common themes around the winners whether they're automotive or high tech
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or other well the the common themes is that when you when you look at the list um wow the common is probably the the
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uncommon meaning that it's a very diversified list there's the auto players are still on
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there the electronics players are still on there there's been some shuffling
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up and down a couple financial services companies i i'd say it's it's very
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diverse and that's exciting apart from the uh the the industries that you mentioned
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how else has the list changed over the last couple of years not just last year but you know maybe the last
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three or four years well you know it's interesting over time the healthcare players have dropped off the
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list um that maybe that's not so surprising given that you know the healthcare industry almost
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by definition are breakthrough radical innovators and when they often go out in the public
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and say we have an innovation problem everybody believes them what most people don't realize is just
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how innovative they are relative to every other industry and so it's almost like the
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smartest kid on the block saying i'm not very good at this but realize that they
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have an extraordinarily high bar there's very little incremental innovation in the
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pharmaceutical industry go ahead anything else that that would be interesting to know about your report
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this year yeah we we've dug into the cultural aspects um of innovation and what we
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found is some very stark lines between um companies that you would say are average innovators to those that are
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strong innovators and those that are breakthrough innovators and they vary along multiple dimensions
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you know in your breakthrough and strong innovator group being part of a new product development
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team is something that people aspire to it's it's a cool kid role it's a
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profession it's not something somebody does as one of the things on their list of things to
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do what we often find in some companies that aren't very good at innovation is
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that new product development is a piece of everybody's job as opposed to being some people's
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full-time job and so we found that that was quite important we've also found that centralizing the decision
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making and control over how innovation resources are managed is also quite important and the stronger and
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more breakthrough the more likely it is that those decisions are centralized as opposed to
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decentralized so there's been some interesting things on on the culture front that
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we'll be talking about thanks very much thank you you