Commentary

66% Of Companies Look To Innovation For New Products, Services

by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, January 19, 2016

Adapting to The Internet of Things requires a lot of innovation and business leaders seem OK with that.

While most business execs see innovation as important, most of them also look to innovation as a way to develop new products or services.

A large majority (91%) of business leaders say innovation is a strategic priority for their company and most (66%) of them see it as a way to develop entirely new products or services moving forward, according to a new study.

The third annual study is based on interviews with 3,100 senior business executives in 25 markets conducted by StrategyOne for GE.

In a change from the past studies, the majority (52%) now look to innovation in the development of new business models.

This is logical, since IoT technologies are going to impact how many companies actually do business, especially with the promised wealth of consumer information coming.

This isn’t lost on business execs, with 60% of them seeing the ability to understand customers and anticipate market evolutions as the number one requirement for a company to innovate successfully, according the study.

All that customer information is part of the coming wave of big data and most (63%) business leaders say their businesses are developing the ability to use big data for innovation.

Many companies (43%) also recognize the need to attract and retail innovative people.

The study also identified a potential gap in how companies are going to innovate moving forward.

While a large majority (79%) of businesses say accessing new technologies is the top reason to collaborate with other companies, a majority (64%) also see the lack of intellectual property protection as the number one barrier to actually collaborate.

Interestingly, size and location of companies to collaborate with are not a major factor.

This may be good news for IoT startups, as their technologies may more easily be adopted by large companies, even those not in the same geography.

The Internet of Things, with its billions of Internet-connected objects, will result in a lot of innovation, whether companies expect it or not.

innovation, iot, mobile

9 comments about "66% Of Companies Look To Innovation For New Products, Services".

Check to receive email when comments are posted.

Barry Bryant from Inventor, Entrepreneur, Design, UX , January 19, 2016 at 4:14 p.m.
The 64% are wise to protect their assets. Intellectual property protection on your process, system and methodology are as important to your business value as they are a determining factor in qualifying strategic alliances and service partners. In technology markets, IP can represent upwards of 60% of a company's asset value at valuation.
Reply

Gray Hammond from G R Hammond, January 19, 2016 at 5:20 p.m.

"66% Of Companies Look To Innovation For New Products, Services". So where do the other 34% look?

Chuck Martin from Chuck Martin, January 19, 2016 at 5:39 p.m.

Good question, Gary, but the study, or at least that question, focused on what companies use innovation for. Hope that helps.

Chuck Martin from Chuck Martin, January 19, 2016 at 5:41 p.m.

Great point, Barry. And intereting that both wanting to parter for tech and IP protection are at the top of their espective categories of wanting to partner and barriers to parterning.

Chris Kocher from Grey Heron, January 19, 2016 at 7:43 p.m.

Glad to see that 52% of execs are realizing hte power of IoT to reengineer business models. This is key because creating new business models that better meet customer needs and relate to the value they derive is extremely high value.

In many cases more revenue can be leveraged from innovation in business modelsthan in product or service innovation. And, new business models can enable companies to move existing products and services into adjacent markets for new revenue growth.

Chuck Martin from Chuck Martin, January 19, 2016 at 8:15 p.m.

True, Chris, though the new business models often involve changing the roles of people. which tends to be one of the tougher aspects of all new tech innovaiton deployments.

Barry Bryant from Inventor, Entrepreneur, Design, UX replied, January 20, 2016 at 11:26 a.m.

Chris, Chuck, The point where IOT gets really interesting in terms of the enormous value generated. Automation across lateral market value chains can be achieved through practice standardization to maximize business asset value and efficiency while reducing overhead. For one example, the Ad-ID standard eliminates the manual re-entry of meta data across ad publishing channels providing asset tracking visibility at IOT access points. Using the standard can provide a clear advertising efficacy tracking mechanism across multichannel consumer touchpoints through purchase attribution.

Adoption of standards in exchange platform allows for processing comparative analysis across industry so that for example; EPC, SKU, GS1, GPC, CRM, SCM, VIN, UDI, GPS, PCI, POS, other feeds analyzed together, provide more robust and actionable data intelligence for system automation.

At her CES keynote, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty discussed dark data. Some 80% of first party data assets that aren't even analyzed, they're simply lost in the flowing river of data glut.

As insights feeds are increased with IOT and industry standards are applied laterally, through intelligent edge node networks and exchange platforms applying cognitive computing, a far more robust analytics environment emerges for actionable real-time data insights and system automation driving enterprise value through win /win alliances.

Chuck Martin from Chuck Martin, January 20, 2016 at 12:36 p.m.

No argument there, Barry, and thanks for sharing your insights. Guess on somewhat of a postive note, IBM stat on unused or uptapped data ws 90% not that long ago.

Neil Mahoney from Mahoney/Marketing replied, January 21, 2016 at 4:30 p.m.

Only 66%?? How does anyone create new or improved products without innovation?? Neil Mahoney