Innovation and Research Strategy For Business Growth

By M. Isi Eromosele

Your company has the potential to be a world leader in innovation. The strength of your company and its wider knowledge base are strategic assets. Your untapped knowledge base could be the most productive in your industry, with a depth and breadth of expertise across over multiple areas of distinctive research strength.

To grow within your industry, your company has to be committed to invest in maintaining and strengthening its knowledge base, and to continue to fund a balance of blue skies and applied innovative projects.

To succeed in the global innovation economy, your company must strengthen its ability to leverage the commercialization of emerging technologies, and to capture the value chains linked to these. The private sector is always going to be central to innovation.

Innovation and research are now increasingly international endeavors. Most innovations originate from multiple countries, drawing in components or technologies developed in multiple locations with the high-growth economies playing an increasingly important part.

Global Collaboration

Open innovation means harnessing new knowledge wherever it comes from. Your business should already have strong partnerships with other companies in the United States and overseas, which will reinforce its strengths and bolster its weaknesses. 

The geography of innovation is changing. Fast growing economies like China and India offer new opportunities for both business, technology and new product development cooperation.

Global Innovation And Research

Other countries understand that innovation is fundamental to economic success. Despite marked differences between national innovation systems, some countries, like the U.S., Japan and Germany innovate more effectively than others.

Scale confers advantage, yet much smaller countries like Sweden also perform strongly.

Fast growing economies like China, Brazil or India are rapidly raising their game.China, for instance, is set to become the second largest recipient of foreign direct investment in the world and is already the second largest investor in R&D after the United States. In the major emerging economies, high-technology manufacturing trade now represents 30 percent of their total manufacturing trade, compared to 25 percent for the OECD (Eurozone) area.

New scientific hubs have been created over the last decade, for instance in Seoul, Shanghai and Sao Paulo. Some universities in Asia, such as the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, are emerging as leading research institutions.

Many factors influence the effectiveness of any innovation system in many countries: governance regime; taxation and regulation of enterprise, and their access to finance; size of manufacturing base; organization of the university sector; levels and orientation of government-funded research; and the role and weight of different public institutions.

The most successful national systems, however, share common characteristics. They exhibit an ability to generate long-term and risky investment at scale for new ideas, both public and private. These new ideas are the result of relationships among people producing, sharing, applying and developing various kinds of knowledge through cohesive networks.

These networks also allow them to engage with international collaborators and adopt innovations that emerge elsewhere in the world. Their governments, delivery bodies and agencies take a leadership role.

They develop technological capabilities through funding research and R&D. They actively support strong collaborations between companies and take investment decisions on research and technological priorities, institutional frameworks as well as education, regulation and infrastructure provision.

Challenge-Led Innovation

Innovation is increasingly driven by the challenges that all nations face in the 21st Century. Current patterns of natural resource use are unsustainable and put global prosperity and growth at risk. Demographic change is affecting all developed economies. By 2050, the proportion of the population aged over 65 will increase from one in six to one in four.

The world needs solutions to these emerging societal needs, and to develop more challenges can only be resolved through interdisciplinary collaboration, across technological and sector expertise, involving both fundamental and applied research.

These challenges will transform sectors such as automotive, healthcare, agri-food, construction and digital systems, requiring the development of new business models, technologies and manufacturing techniques.

Design For Innovation

Design can be transformative for your company, through leading or supporting product

and process innovation for managing the innovation process itself, for the

commercialization of discoveries and the delivery of products and services.

Research has consistently shown a link between the use of design and improved business performance across key measures including turnover, profit and market share. Most successful high-tech businesses are design and technology-driven.

• Increase the scale and reach of your innovation infrastructure through expanding their capability
• Support innovative collaborations between your business and knowledge base, through innovation vouchers and increased numbers of Knowledge Transfer Partnerships
• Improve the competitiveness of your business and its products and services through design
• Accelerate your international collaboration with other global companies, including your competitors

Intellectual Property

Intellectual Property (IP) is a significant factor for growth for many companies; innovative companies that use intellectual property rights are associated with significantly better chances of firm survival and company growth.

Evidence shows that use of patents is associated with greater knowledge creation, better use of knowledge within firms and higher transfer rates of knowledge between firms. Trade mark use is similarly associated with higher firm productivity and innovation.,

However, in protecting their innovation, SMEs lag behind large firms. While 13 percent of large firms seek to protect their intellectual property through patents, only 6 percent of SMEs do so and therefore miss opportunities to seize the full value of their ideas. This is often because smaller firms do not always understand the value of their IP.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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