Sustainability: business, life, environment

What is the true measure of business innovation?  For many companies, the answer to this question is “new sales growth”.  However, this growth can often be short-lived or come at the expense of base market share.  Our sustainability consulting argues that innovation is better measured in terms of business sustainability.

Expressed in the article, Revitalizing the R&D Vitality Metric, many firms realize only a fraction of their potential top-line growth from new products.  More often focusing on metrics like “sales growth”, these companies chase the short-term focused and sometimes less sustainable ideas in the pursuit of immediate return.

Research and Development (R&D) and supporting innovation process should ultimately align to build a pipeline of sustainable business pursuits.  That is why we find business sustainability leaders often spend more time and devote more resources to defining the best ideas.  

•    Focus on the Front-End: Innovation leaders spend more time working the innovation process to identify higher-quality ideas at the front end and consequently fund more sustainable ideas than their peers.

•    Collaborate Externally: Top performers devote more to open innovation with stakeholders, thus they are better at combining external technologies with internal capabilities.

•    Optimize the Best Ideas: Leading innovators spend more time in the innovation process and less time in execution.

•    Improve Transparency: The best firms communicate and collaborate on successes and failures to continuously improve the process.

Increasing top-line performance is a great measure of success, but it is only relevant if it is sustainable over the long-term.  Business sustainability is a about identifying and pursuing actions that promote the long-term stability of the organization.  Sometimes viewed in the repose to negative actions, an equally important role of business sustainability is a strong and continuous flow of innovative pursuits.